1 The concept of American Exceptionalism is based on the ideas that the US as a nation is politically, socially, and morally distinctly different from other nations, especially from those of the so-called Old World in Europe, because this new nation is founded on democratic documents like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and thus a model for other countries. This exceptionalism's foundational moment is rooted in JohnWinthrop's declaration:"We shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us," delivered in a sermon onboard the Arabella to a group of Puritan migrants in 1630 (qtd. in Pease, "American Exceptionalism"). The so-called Founding Fathers of the Republic in the late eighteenth century announced the US as the future champion of universal rights of humankind (Pease, "American Exceptionalism").

In *Contesting Citizenship: Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of the Political,* Anne McNevin introduces the term irregular migrants for people who do not have a legal, documented, or permanent status in their country of residence. The economies of North America and Europe, as well as other countries in Asia and Africa, often rely on the labor of immigrants with indeterminate legal status (132). However, "irregular migrants are more than passive victims shuttled from one place to another.They are also active agents in the transformation of political belonging," writes McNevin (viii). Immigrants' political belonging to and partaking in the society and economy of their country of residence as asylum seekers, green-card holders, or naturalized citizens contrasts and seems to be at odds with notions of mobility and fluidity of borders, nations, concepts, and people that the transnational approaches of American Studies as well as of citizenship studies at times emphasize. It is this tension that will be discussed in this chapter.

Narratives like *Behold the Dreamers*, however, depict the hard facts of the legal conditions of mobile laborers as the prerequisites for immigrants' social and political participation. My reading of Mbue's novel *Behold the Dreamers* thus analyzes the protagonists'intertwined narratives of belonging and citizenship and argues for the centrality of the legal conditions on which all other moments of and chances for their cultural, economic, and political participation in the US ultimately depend.This approach extends the idea of migration as the movement from one place to the US, and as typically ending in integration, to a multi-perspectivity on migration when it shows how migrants turn their back on discriminatory practices in the US that perpetuate their status as illegal or irregular migrants who are exposed to criminalization and exploitation. The transnational lens applied in this chapter thereby foregrounds the central yet often neglected role that citizenship discourses hold in literary reflections about immigration processes and social and economic participations of immigrants in US-American society. Additionally, this comparative perspective on US-citizenship which the protagonists of Mbue's Cameroonian American novel present is analyzed as what Taiye Selasi has coined an "Afropolitan" view that further challenges the centrality of the United States in literary, cultural, and legal discourses on migration from the perspective of contemporary writers from African countries. Depicting the characters not so much as the global young professionals of the Afropolitan community but as irregular immigrants in the US, *Behold the Dreamers* ultimately locates current transmigration discourses around issues of cultural and, most importantly, legal citizenship.

#### **Transnational Approaches in Literary Studies and Citizenship Studies**

The Transnational Turn has shaped much scholarship in American Studies in the past few decades. Prominentlyintroduced by Shelley Fisher-Fishkinin her presidential address to the American Studies Association in 2004, this turn seeks to counter the idea of American Exceptionalism and views the United States and US American culture as "a crossroads of cultures" located both inside as well as outside its national borders and calls for a comparative study of social movements and cultural productions (Fisher-Fishkin 28–32).2 Sharing ties with multicultural and ethnic studies in its conception of the US as a multicultural nation, Transnational American Studies understands immigration no longer primarily from the point of view of immigrants leaving their "home" to make a new one in the US. Rather,migration is seen as a "process of comings and goings that create familial, cultural, linguistic, and economic ties across national borders" in which America is less seen as a "static and stable territory and population" (24).

In this context, globalization plays a significant role in the critical and scholarly recharting of the United States in transnational terms. Generally, the term globalization describes "[t]he process by which the world is becoming increasingly connected through access to global markets, technology and information, but at the same time homogenized by the very forces of globalization which are still located in the capitalist societies in the West" (Cuddon 304–305). The increasing connectivity between regions and people, which are made possible in large part by recent developments in information technologies, communication technologies, and modes of travel, led to the destabilization of cultural boundaries and geographical borders. At the same time, globalization increases the homogenization of products and modes of consumption that "mask older forms of Western imperial domination" (Cuddon 305). This increasing connectivity encompasses economic, social, and individual spheres. As social critics of transnationalism observe, economic changes in the US that transformed the industrial and manufacturing economy of the early and mid-twentieth century to a service economy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries on one hand and that disintegrated local economies in the global South on the other, brought forth migrants with what Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Barsch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton term a "transnational existence" (9). This transnational existence is caused by "economic dislocations in bothThird World and in industrialized nations … yet made it difficult for the migrants to construct secure cultural, social or economic bases within their new settings" (Glick Schiller et al. 9). This "new and different phenomenon" (9) of "transmigrants" who "build fields that

2 Robert Gross describes the development from American Exceptionalism to Transnationalism: "In the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of scholars set out to demolish the myth of exceptionalism. Variously inspired by the New Left and looking at American history 'from the bottom up,' they scoured the past for proof that the United States was no different from other Western nations. Its working class had fought militantly against the bosses; its farmers could behave like peasants the world round. Patriarchy oppressed women on both sides of the Atlantic. War and conquest dominated the nation's history. And slavery and racism were the original sin. The biggest deception was the myth of American innocence" (Gross 387).

link together their country of origin and their country of settlement" (1) cannot only be attributed to "the invention of rapid transportation and communication systems" but also must consider "the current state of the world social and economic system, as the reason why modern-day migrants are more likely to maintain ongoing ties to their societies of origin" (Glick Schiller et al. 9). In a similar line, Donald E. Pease describes the complex and contested role of globalization and its social, economic, and technological processes for transnational studies and its related disciplines of literary and cultural studies:

Transnational American studies can valorize deterritorializations that serve the interests of the world marketplace and transnational corporations. It can also endorse movements that advance concerns of antiglobalization activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), environmentalists, social movements, migrant laborers, refugees, and stateless peoples. ("How Transnationalism Reconfigured the Field of American Studies" 40)

Transnationalism is thus "a highly contradictory concept" and considers effects of economic globalization and the global mobility of people (Pease 40).

Charting the conceptual potentials of analyzing migration, immigration, and citizenship in a global space that goes beyond the limits and borders of the nation-state of the US, a transnational perspective redefines immigration discourses when the geographical area of the nation-state "is no longer synonymous with the interests of U.S. citizens" (Giles 16). Related to transnationalism is a planetary approachin multicultural literature that focuses on global influences on a given culture and community in a specific historical moment (Fisher-Fishkin; Hornung). "Evaluating the fate of displaced migrants and their unstable places of residence, cultural critics of ethnic writers moved away from the national frame of reference to an analysis of local factors of migrants' lives and their potential construction of a sense of place," writes Hornung in "Planetary Citizenship" (39). He continues, "[w]hile America represented the locus of global economic structures, which expressed itself in the superficial equation of globalization and Americanization, academic disciplines concerned with national literatures and cultures moved beyond these borders" (39). Globalization changes the roles and constituents of nation-states and invites new interpretations of citizenship that emphasize the mobility and fluidity of concepts and people in a globalized world.

Citizenship studies has likewise debated a transnational turn in the field of states, polities, citizens, and migrants and stresses the "boundary crossing practices, rights,identities and statuses"in political, social, and philosophical discourses on citizenship (Bauböck 2). In the introduction to *Transnational Citizenship and Migration*, Rainer Bauböck gives a detailed definition of the term transnational and its application in citizenship studies: If citizenship describes the "legal and political

status" of individuals in relation to a given nation-state and primarily distinguishes citizens from non-citizens in that state, the concept of transnational citizenship seems to be a paradox as one can either be a member or citizen of a given nation state or not (1). Emphasizing immigrants and their movements and mobilities, transnational citizenship studies postulate that "migrants are simultaneously rather than sequentially engaged in citizenship relations with at least two states and, … the crossing of territorial borders by migrants generates also a blurring of membership boundaries" (3). What follows from this observation is that immigrants may find themselves in

… a membership relation between an individual and several independent states that is articulated through legal statuses, rights and duties, as well as informal practices and identities, and that extends across the territorial borders and nationality boundaries of the states involved. We have seen that there is nothing paradoxical about the concept if we take into account the dual nature of state jurisdiction and consider citizenship as involving not only a singular relation between an individual and a state, but a triangular one between a person and different states connected through individuals' multiple ties across borders. (Bauböck 4)

Transnational turns in both American Studies and citizenship studies emphasize the mobility and fluidity of concepts like nationality, ethnicity, and culture as well as of people as migrants, immigrants, and citizens. Concepts like citizenship, the nation-state or the polity of a given country are perceived as flexible and permeable. Recent migration literature, such as Mbue's novel *Beholdthe Dreamers*, however, applies this transnational perspective when it portrays the trope of the American Dream and its impact as pull factor for people worldwide vis-a-vis the legal—and most often solid—conditions of granting and gaining citizenship, and of belonging not only metaphorically but also legally to the US.

#### *Behold the Dreamers***: A Transnational Immigration Narrative**

"Anyone entering this country can make up any story about what their life was like back in their country. You can say you were a prince, or someone who ran an orphanage, or a political activist, and the average American will say, oh, wow!" (*Behold the Dreamers* 226). These are the words of Winston, a successful associate lawyer, to his compatriot Jende, a recent immigrant from Cameroon and the protagonist of Imbolo Mbue's novel *Behold the Dreamers*. The quote encapsulates the novel's plot that depicts the immigration experience and attempted naturalization process of Jende and his wife Neni, who move from their hometown Limbe to the United States of America in hope of better social and economic prospects in the wake of the Obama

Presidency and the global financial crisis of 2008.3 Jende, a low-skilled man in his thirties, leaves his home in Cameroon and migrates to the United States, applies for asylum, holds precarious jobs, and saves as much money as he can to bring his wife Neni and son Liomi to the US two years later.

Although in the first few chapters of the novel the Jonga family seem on their way to settling in New York City financially and socially, Jende's asylum application and his hope to acquire a legal permanent residence permit in the US are ill-fated, as attentive readers soon find out. Even though immigrants may reinvent the stories of their past lives and the average American listener may believe them, the novel shows that even if immigrants are able to keep up with the fast pace of the precarious branches of labor for unskilled newcomers and earn enough money to partake in American society, the legal conditions of asylum and naturalization processes in the US ultimately decide the fate of immigrants like the characters Jende and Neni. In Jende's case, the exaggerated story of personal prosecution at the hands of his father-in-law does not meet the formal conditions of asylum eligibility as defined by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service: people who are expecting to or have "suffered persecution … due to: Race, Religion, Nationality, Membership in a particular social group, Political opinion" ("Asylum").4

The novel introduces the sub-plot of Jende's asylum application in the first chapter when Jende answers a question about his legal status in the US in the job interview with Clark Edwards. Answering correctly—albeit only vaguely—he says he has an Employment Authorization Document, and that he is "very legal, sir … just … still waiting for my green card" (*Behold the Dreamers* 7). A few pages later the narrative depicts him reminiscing in free indirect and free direct thought about his first two years in the US and the early meetings with his lawyer Bubakar and his own hope for "claim[ing] his share of the milk, honey, and liberty flowing in the paradise-for-strivers called America" (19). "Bubakar … was not only a great immigration lawyer with hundreds of African clients all over the country but also an expert in the art of giving clients the best stories of persecution to gain asylum" (19). Although Jende and his cousin Winston doubt Bubakar's skills as immigration lawyer

3 For a detailed discussion of the post-9/11 and pre-Obama context in the novel see Elizabeth Toohey "9/11 and the Collapse of the American Dream: Imbolo Mbue's *Behold the Dreamers*."

4 In the "The Year of Living Nervously" in *The New York Times*, Emily Brady portrays the story of Njoya Hilary Tikum, an immigrant from Cameroon who successfully applied for asylum in the US in 2006 on well-founded grounds of having endured torture during imprisonment for his political activism for the secession of the English-speaking provinces from Cameroon. During his four months in prison, Jende suffers inadequate food and lack of medical treatment, conditions that he describes as "far more horrendous than he's imagined," but the narrative does not depict him as having experienced any physical violence or torture (*Behold the Dreamers* 245). The novel thus refrains from giving Jende a political background that would justify his asylum application.

after their first few meetings, they follow his advice and file the asylum application for "persecution based on belonging to a particular social group" due to class differences between Jende's family and Neni's parents, who do not allow their daughter to marry him (23–24).

Like Jende's stagnating asylum application, in the first half of the plot the naturalization process remains rather vague and looms in the background. Instead, the novel explores in more detail the settling-in phase of the family and their hopes and dreams for a secure future in New York, which seems to be at hand when Jende is hired by Clark Edwards.Thus, in line with its title, *Behold the Dreamers* at first evokes the ethos of the American Dream and invites readers to observe the move of the Jonga family from their bleak(albeit not endangered) existencein Limbe,Cameroon, to their new home in Harlem. Exploring the trope of the American Dream and its pull-factors, the story starts with a moment of success that catapults Jende from "dishwasher in Manhattan restaurant[s and] … cabdriver in the Bronx" to his imminent employment as chauffeur of a high-ranking executive manager at the investment bank Lehman Brothers (*Behold the Dreamers* 3). Correspondingly, the novel introduces readers to the main character Jende when he is high above the streets of midtown Manhattan for his job interview in Clark Edward's office in the Lehman Brothers building. Jende is holding the résumé that was stitched together and jazzed up a few days before by a career counselor in the public library in sweaty palms envisioning his future in the US. The success story continues when Neni receives good grades in college and is hired by Clark's wife Cindy as domestic help in the Edwards' summer house in the Hamptons. Together, the couple can save up a lot of money and the possibility of a financially stable future seems at hand.

What is at stake for the Jonga's realization of their American Dream—a "down payment for a two-bedroom in Mount Vernon or Yonkers" and a college education for their son (*Behold the Dreamers* 30)—are the legal conditions of their existence in the US. As the story unfolds, Neni's and Jende's experiences as immigrants in the US counter common tropes of immigration discourses. For example, that migration "automatically leads to a better life; and that the ultimate goal of migration is to assimilate to a new place"(Ahmad xviii). Juxtaposing the Jonga family to the white, rich family of Clark Edwards, his wife Cindy, and their sons Vince and Mighty, the unravelling of Jende's job situation halfway through the novel could easily be related to the conflicts between Clark and Cindy and their failing marriage due to which Jende loses his job as Clark's chauffeur. The economic recession during which Jende finds himself jobless certainly adds its share of challenges. However, the ultimate obstacle for Jende to succeed in the US is his unsuccessful application for asylum. Unlike Winston's exclamation above suggests, Jende did not reinvent his vitae beyond describing his miscellaneous jobs in Limbe and Manhattan in terms of more serious professions like "farmer," "street cleaner," "dishwasher," and "cabdriver" when he applies for asylum but takes the advice of his—as it turns out—clueless immigration

lawyer to tell a weak story about alleged threats of violence and imprisonment at the hands of Neni's father to prevent their marriage were he ever to return to Cameroon (3; 23–24).

The migrant Jende endorses a "relational view of citizenship" when he compares his situation in the US to that of Barack Obama, the son of an African immigrant like Jende, who at the time is competing against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party's nomination as candidate for the presidential election of 2008 (Bauböck 2). Whereas in Cameroon Jende does not see any chances of social standing and financial security for himself and his son because his family neither has a lot of money nor a social reputation, explaining to Clark that "Cameroon has nothing" (Behold the Dreamers 40), in the US he identifies similarities between Obama, his father Onyango Obama, and himself and his son Liomi. He thus concludes that since Obama "is a black man with no father or mother trying to be president over a country, … America has something for everyone" (40). For Jende, Obama's rise as the son of a Kenyan immigrant to Harvard Law School graduate, Illinois state legislator,United States senator, and Democratic presidential candidate symbolizes the promise of "cultural mobility and cultural sharing" accessible to all those who are willing to work hard, as entailed in the trope of the American Dream (Paul 261). Toohey summarizes Jende's conception of the American Dream: "For Jende the American Dream is a meritocracy in which neither race nor nation are an obstacle and Obama naturally symbolizes and promises all of that through his own ascendance to what appears as the pinnacle of both American and global power" (394). Conclusively, Obama gives voice to Jende's belief in the possibilities for success that the US holds for African migrants when he says in his 2008 nomination address:

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas…. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. (Obama)

Obama's vita symbolizes and represents the very notion of transnational mobility and identity not only for Jende but also for transnational American Studies. Inaugurating Obama as a prime example of a transnational life constitutive of much scholarship in contemporary American Studies, Hornung has analyzed and discussed the autobiographical writings of the former US President as representative of this notion of transnational citizenship. This representation favors shared experiences of "multiple migrations, repeated efforts of adjustment and acculturation in different places of residence and problematic political allegiance to a loose concept of nationality" that are reflectedin life writings likeObamas and,as I assert,in recent fictional migration narratives like *Behold the Dreamers* (Hornung 40).

While the narrative of the American Dream as the success of the individual regardless of their cultural and familial background and of the US as a "crossroads of cultures" where encounters between people from various cultural and ethnic backgrounds are not only possible but enable and encourage understanding is reflected in some of the encounters between the families of Jende and Clark,*Beholdthe Dreamers* does not present the legal conditions of immigrants in the US as flexible, mobile, and fluid. The solid legal definition of citizen, permanent resident, and asylum seeker as described by US federal law ultimately defines the status of and re-territorializes the location of the immigrant.This seems to be the fallacy in Jende's comparison between Obama's rise as the son of an unknown Kenyan immigrant to renown lawyer, senator, and president, from which he infers the hope for his son "to become a respectable man," in the US (39). The decisive—and deciding—difference between Jende (and by extension Liomi) and Obama is that while his father was an immigrant student from Kenya, his mother was a US citizen and Obama was born in the US and is thus a US citizen, too. Jende and Liomi on the other hand have little, if no, chances for permanently staying in the US legally, as it turns out. Jende's comparison with Obama may also rest on a misunderstanding of the conditions of citizenship: understanding citizenship as "a person's allegiance to a government in exchange for its protection at home and abroad" and understanding allegiance as "the obligation of an alien to the government under which the alien resides" ("Using 'Citizen' and 'Resident' Legally"; "Allegiance"), Jende identifies himself semantically as a citizen of the US. Having verbally rejected his Cameroonian citizenship when exclaiming that "Cameroon has nothing" (*Beholdthe Dreamers* 40), Jende has pledged allegiance to the US when he professes a few pages later, "I thank God, and I believe I work hard, and one day I will have a good life here….  I believe that anything is possible for anyone who is American" (46). In this sense, the exchange between Jende and Clark in the quotes above reflects Bauböck's statement that "migrants should always be understood as being both emigrants and immigrants" (3). Transnationalism's idea of fluent and permeable borders and concepts thus finds its equivalent in the conflict that Jende faces when he feels that he must disavow his Cameroonian citizen identity to proclaim allegiance to the US:

If we transfer this banal but widely ignored insight from migration studies to citizenship studies we become aware, first, that migrants are simultaneously rather than sequentially engaged in citizenship relations with at least two states and, second, that the crossing of territorial borders by migrants generates also a blurring of membership boundaries. (Bauböck 3)

This blurring of membership boundaries, however, is not part of the legal process of Jende's asylum and naturalization process. Still, he will find a way to reconcile this transnational understanding of citizenship with his legal situation in the US toward the end of the narrative, as I will discuss below.

As slowly as the asylum application process started in the beginning, the faster it unravels once Jende must appear in court before an immigration judge. Shortly after Neni and Jende's daughter is born, Jende receives a letter from the US Citizenship and Immigration Service that his asylum application is not approved:

On the basis of being admitted to the United States in August of 2004 with authorization to remain for a period not to exceed three months and staying beyond November 2004 without further authorization, it has been charged that he is subject to removal from the United States, the letter said. He was to appear before an immigration judge to show why he should not be removed from the country. (*Behold the Dreamers* 224)

Immigration lawyer Bubakar and Neni urge Jende to prolong deportation and exhaust all legal and financial means to stay in the US for as long as possible. "We're going to buy you a whole lot of time in this country," Bubakar promises (224). From the perspective of the lawyer, asylum applications are a business, and the process of gaining a green card or an American passport is a business transaction and an investment. "It's going to cost good money,my brother. Immigration is not cheap. You have to do what you gotta do and pay it," says Bubakar to Jende (224–25). However, taking up the legal battle would happen at the same time when the family is facing financial difficulties. Not only does Jende's rejected asylum application coincide with the birth of their daughter Timba, who is *jus soli* a US citizen, but this is also the winter of the economic recession and the moment when Clark lays off Jende as his chauffeur at the insistence of Cindy, who feels ashamed that Jende knows about their marriage crisis. Jende must work three jobs at the same time but still does not make enough money to cover the family's living expenses, and he soon suffers from health problems.

The novel leaves open to interpretation the causality of the sequence of events around Jende's job situation and the rejected asylum application. It remains open to speculation if Jende and Neni's situation would have been different were this not the year of economic recession in the US or the period of post-9/11 immigration policies.5 However, the bleak job opportunities bring Jende to assess his situation more realistically and he begins to accept the fact that they will have to return to Cameroon eventually, because he understands that even if he were able to prolong his legal case,

5 For a detailed discussion of *Behold the Dreamers* as post 9/11 fiction see Toohey.

the family's financial situation and the country's economic state would make it impossible for them to lead a safe and self-reliant life in the US:

In America today, having documents is not enough. Look at how many people with papers are struggling. Look at how even some Americans are suffering. They were born in this country. They have American passports, and yet they are sleeping on the street, going to bed hungry, losing their jobs and houses every day in this…this economic crisis. (307)

This quote encapsulates the intricate situation of many immigrants in the US in the early twenty-first century and shows that reading the immigration narrative of Jende and Neni in terms of metaphorical belonging would fall short of considering the legal and economic foundations on which concepts like self-reliance and the American Dream rest. A reading that focuses on the legal and economic backgrounds of the immigration narrative then brings to the fore dire conditions of poor and working-class immigrants in the US, because for many of them, as for Jende and Neni, their legal situation very much depends on their financial situation:

Even if Jende got papers, Winston went on, without a good education, and being a black African immigrant male, he might never be able to make enough money to afford to live the way he'd like to live, never mind having enough to own a home or pay for his wife and children to go to college. He might never be able to have a good sleep at night. (322)

Thus, social and cultural participation in the US is not so much about welcoming immigrants, as the liberal protestant pastor and immigrant Natasha preaches at the church Neni joins (364–65).6 Rather, for immigrants and many US citizens alike, social and cultural participation is more a matter of who can *afford* to partake in American society.

The legal situation of Jende and Neni is grounded in their financial situation, which is one that cannot be changed through hard work and diligence. This means that the aspirational goal of immigrant cultural integration into US-American society that is entailed in the American Dream is one that is only attainable for those immigrants that have the financial means to afford living in the US. As Clark says to Jende, thinking about the future of his son Vince, who wants to quit law school, but encapsulating Jende's situation quite well, too, "unless you make a certain kind of money in this country, life can be brutal" (147–48). Jende and Neni Jonga's legal and financial situation in the US is, according to Clark and Cindy Edwards, also accompanied by cultural difference.

6 For a detailed discussion of Natasha as an example of a "white savior" see Toohey.

The car in which Jende drives Clark and his family through Manhattan and Long Island symbolizes the transnational space in which Jende, Clark, Cindy, and their sons Mighty and Vince communicate with each other about their different cultural backgrounds, their shared life experiences as parents on a mostly friendly, attentive, and at times personal level.These conversations contrast the "quasi-Babel in a New York City livery cab" created by the interactions between people from various cultural, social, and national backgrounds in the microcosm of the globalized world that New York City is a trope of in popular discourses (16). Shortly after Jende becomes Clark's chauffeur, Cindy hires Neni as help in their summer home in the Hamptons, and the interactions between the Jongas and the Edwards can first be read as an example for a successful intercultural understanding and transnational "contact zone" as envisioned by transnational and multicultural literary studies (Pratt). Although a certain cultural curiosity and skepticism or distance remains on both sides, Cindy and Clark (for example) think of Jende and Neni's hosting of a Cameroonian evening in their home in Harlem as an intercultural contact "experience" for their children (345). Differences in family traditions, social customs, or way of life do not seem to be the characteristics on which differences between the American and the Cameroonian family are based. On the contrary, familial similarities and conflicts between fathers and sons, mothers, parents, and siblings of the Jongas and the Clarks appear in conversations throughout the novel.

Thus, it is almost ironic that in the moment in which Jende emancipates himself from the tropes of the immigrant desiring to integrate into mainstream society at all costs and without choice, his legalization and naturalization process essentializes his cultural "otherness." Leti Volpp points out the legal and cultural construction of citizen and non-citizen and explains the reciprocal relationship between these constructs and the role that cultural "othering" plays in this binary:

The citizen is assumed to be modern and motivated by reason; the cultural other is assumed to be traditional and motivated by culture. In order to be assimilated into citizenship, the cultural other needs to shed his excessive and archaic culture. Citizenship emerges through its distinction from the cultural other, who is measured and found wanting for citizenship. We should therefore understand that the cultural other is constitutive of the citizen. (574)

The moment Jende acts not as the culturally "other" "backward" or "irrational immigrant" stereotype is when he acts and decides "rationally" and "self-determinately"—at least to the point that he rejects a life as an irregular migrant—that he will not be able to become the "respectable man" he had hoped for but will have to enter the vast undocumented and unregulated immigrant work force were he to stay in the US. Unlike how the stereotype would have him behave, he is "motivated by reason," to use Volpp's formulation quoted above, and returns to Cameroon. The

moment he would thus culturally and mentally qualify as US citizen, he leaves the US, albeit as a "transmigrant" and "self-made" man who uses the money he has earned in the US to open his own business in Limbe (Glick Schiller et al. 1). Jende, Neni, and their children return to Limbe to their own house and business.

The transnational lens on the concept of citizenship prevents a reading of the migrant's return as defeat because it compares Jende's position in the US after his job loss and rejected asylum application to the prospects that he will have in Limbe after his return from the US. Reflecting the semantics of the citizen of Volpp's quote above, in a conversation with Winston Jende reasons, "Cameroon did not have opportunities like America, but that did not mean one should stay in America if doing so no longer made sense"(*BeholdtheDreamers* 322). It is here that Jende can eventually emancipate himself from the "grotesque being created by the sufferings of an American immigrant life" that he has become to Neni and his children as well as from the demeaning behavior that he assumed while working for Clark Edwards (237). Visiting Clark shortly before the family's departure, Jende can now explain his situation to his former boss clearly and rationally. When Clark asks Jende why he returns to Cameroon, he answers:

No, sir, I'm not being deported. But I cannot get a green card unless I am granted asylum, and for that to happen I will have to spend many years and a lot of money going to immigration court. And then maybe the judge will still decide to not give me asylum, which means the government will deport me in the end. It's not how I want to live my life sir, especially when you add the fact that it's just not easy for a man to enjoy his life in this country if he is poor. (372–73)

At the end of the novel, Jende can comprehend his years in the US in the context of his life and what it means for his future in Cameroon when he says, "because of that job I was able to save money and now I can go back home to live well"(372). Due to his changed financial situation and the business experience, Jende is "no longer afraid of [his] country the way [he] used to be" (373). The emancipation process that Jende experiences as the plot progresses is an example of the "complex and multilayered" context of migrations and their narratives that Ahmad describes when she writes that "migration would be better understood as effect rather than cause" (xviii).

Although Jende quickly adapts to ways and customs of US-American society and the pace of his tight work schedule in New York, he also maintains financial and emotional ties to his family and community in Nigeria when he sends money to his parents and extended family and cannot forgive himself for not being able to attend his father's funeral (304). Despite what can be called his symbolic disavowal of his Nigerian citizenship in favor of expressing allegiance to the US in the scene quoted above, Jende participates in the social and material flows across nation states and borders that mark globalization. Jende's situation as transnational migrant is marked by the reconciliation of these complex and at times even conflicting characteristics of his identity, which Glick Schiller et al. attribute to transmigrants. "Through these seemingly contradictory experiences, transmigrants actively manipulate their identities and thus both accommodate to and resist their subordination within a global capitalist system" (Glick Schiller et al. 12). For Jende, the reconciliation of his Nigerian citizenship and his loyalty to the US eventually enable him to emancipate himself from oppressive US-American labor conditions and to exit voluntarily the regularization process that he started with an ungrounded asylum application before facing detention and deportation.

#### **Afropolitan Transmigration**

This transnational perspective on migration narratives presents an outside, and outsider's, perspective on immigration discourses in the US. The immigrant Jende emancipates himself from the myth of the American Dream and its narratives of metaphorical belonging that sidetrack the story of legal and economic realities of immigrants like him. Echoing the figurative language of this myth, Jende summarizes the labor conditions of immigrants in New York during the financial crisis when he says, "[t]his country no longer has room for people like us" (332).7 And although Jende and Neni are in the beginning of the novel certain that they will stay permanently in the US since this country has so much to offer them, the juxtaposition of Manhattan and Lagos—not only metaphorically in the memories of the characters but also as concrete localities and cultural spaces—extends the tropes of the traditional immigrant novel in the US to a transnational context. Reflecting this new-found independence, Jende declines Winston's offer as hotel manager in Limbe and uses the money he earned in the US to start his own agricultural business with his family's plot of land, applying the skills he acquired while working for Clark to "diversify and conglomerate and acquire as many competitors as possible" (353). As transnational migrants, Jende and Neni no longer see the necessity to disavow US society and the so-called American way of life to reintegrate into their communities in Nigeria. Rather, they can put their skills and experiences as well as their material goods to use in Limbe when they exhibit Wallstreet smartness and fake and original Gucci and Versace outfits (11).

At the end of the novel, Jende resembles the "fair number of African professionals" who are returning to African countries from American, British, Canadian, and European metropoles and whom Taiye Selasi describes as Afropolitans in her 2005

7 This "like us" also includes American citizens such as his middle-aged co-worker Leah at Lehman Brothers, who is unable to find a new job after the bank's collapse in the ensuing economic crisis.

essay "Bye-bye Babar." The term Afropolitan refers to young artists, writers, musicians, and business professionals who live in globalized urban spaces across the world and have ties to the African continent. In Selasi's words, this new generation is a "funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics" at home in one or more "G 8 cities" and in "at least one place on the African Continent," who "choose which bits of a national identity (from passport to pronunciation) [they] internalize," and who are "not citizens, but Africans of the world" (Selasi). Foregrounding their creative work, she emphasizes that they "refus[e] to oversimplify" Africa and its pasts and presents: "Rather than essentializing the geographical entity, we seek to comprehend the cultural complexity" (Selasi). The essay sparked and rekindled a heated debate in artistic, academic, and media circles about representations of generalized and often stereotyped images of Africa and Africans in Western, that is US-American and European, discourses on one hand and about the positions and roles of contemporary creative professionals with roots and links to African countries and cultures on the other.8

Mbue's *Behold the Dreamers* does not obviously adhere to the understanding of Afropolitan/Afropolitanism as outlined in Selasi's essay. Firstly, the novel's main characters Jende and Neni do not belong to the sophisticated, intellectual, and worldly community that characterizes Selasi's Afropolitan (Selasi). Secondly, it foregrounds the migration story of Jende and Neni in the tradition of the immigrant novel popular in the US when it sets out to depict the couple's efforts to partake in the American Dream as the self-made success story of the integrated, industrious, and enduring immigrant worker. What the so-called one percent at the top of the social ladder and the immigrant worker share is their belief in the American Dream, which they find out is a "very tough challenge achieving," as Imbolo Mbue describes the commonalities of the two families who inhabit the top and bottom steps, respectively, of the social ladder in a *CBS: This Morning* interview ("Oprah's Book Club"). Thirdly, it applies the idea of "not citizens but Africans of the world" quite literally to the legal situation of its protagonists (Selasi), who cannot choose from a set of privileged nationalities but preempt deportation by voluntarily returning to their country of national origin.

8 In "Cosmopolitanism with African Roots: Afropolitanism's Ambivalent Mobilities," Susanne Gehrmann contextualizes and summarizes the popular, digital, and academic controversies around the concept. Analyzing two key novels that engage the discourse, Teju Cole's *Open City* (2012) and Taiye Selasi's *Ghana Must Go* (2013), Gerhmann concludes, "These novels open up a fruitful literary landscape for the uncovering of contemporary Afro-diasporic identity politics traversing America, Africa and Europe" (69). Donald Morales points out in defense of the concepts as formulated by Selasi, "Afropolitanism should not be dismissed as a commercial or pop-culture movement but a future-leaning way of moving African literature and art forward" ("An Afropolitan 2017 Update" 229).

However, what *Behold the Dreamers* and the Afropolitan discourse share is the comparative point of view on US-American society and its "monopoly on the idea of being a 'nation of immigrants'" (Ahmad xix). The transnational lenses of both Afropolitanism and *Behold the Dreamers* call into question the assumption that "the ultimate goal of migration is to assimilate to a new place" and foreground the movement and mobility of transmigrants (Ahmad xviii). Speaking about the evolution of the concept Afropolitanism several years later in an interview with Bhakti Shringarpure, Selasi relativizes the critique of her essay as elitist and stresses travel as necessity rather than luxury:

The essay describes, very specifically, a group of people in movement. But they are not—or not mostly—in movement toward luxury packaged vacations. They're going from Storrs to Nairobi to see their family, from London to Lagos on on-sale flights, they're counting their pennies to pay inflated prices at Christmas, they're trying to get home (from home). (Selasi qtd. in Shringarpure)

The young professionals of "Bye-bye Babar" are thus to be understood as the result of their parents' "obsession with upward mobility" who are raised and trained internationally with the aim to enter the "global middle class" (Selasi qtd. in Shringarpure). On a similar note, Madhu Krishnan identifies contemporary African novels that portray the returns of their protagonists, so-called narratives of return (144), as "departing from the more market-driven image of the African subject as a mobile, free-floating consumer of culture" that is represented in the image of the Afropolitan (145). Thus, Jende and Neni's return to Cameroon and the comparison of the living and precarious working conditions of immigrants in the US challenge both the myth of the American Dream as global master narrative of a successful life and the centrality or dominance of the transnational discourse of migration. Jende gives voice to this "monopoly" when he reasons that "Columbus Circle is the center of Manhattan. Manhattan is the center of New York. New York is the center of America, and America is the center of the world" (*Behold the Dreamers* 96). For Neni and Jende, Columbus Circle presents a microcosm of a global, transnational world where people from all over the world cross but do not necessarily interact.9 Neni, for example, observes that "most people were sticking to their own kind. Even in New York City, even in a place of many nations and cultures, men and women, young and old, rich and poor, preferred their kind when it came to those they kept closest" (95). Columbus Circle thus symbolizes the promises and opportunities of the US

9 Toohey describes the symbolism of the statue of Christopher Columbus in post-9/11 narratives like *Behold the Dreamers* as follows: "Columbus as the arrival of the new and the symbolic starting point for Europeans' possession of the land and claim of racial superiority, and subjugation of enslaved Africans in the new world—these two sides of the man and his myth blend in the Jonga's experience of New York" (392).

and the American Dream. But these promises come with a price for Afropolitan transmigrants and their families and communities, as Selasi points out:

Travel was how we kept our family together. We didn't have a choice. We did have the means. And that is, undoubtedly, a privilege. But the fracturedness of the family unit, its multi-locality, is a post-colonial outcome. To re-write that multi-locality in capitalist terms is to erase the human cost, the heartbreak." (Selasi qtd. in Shringarpure)

Globalization and the free flow of capital, goods, people, and ideas enables the Jongas to first migrate to the US without cutting ties with their families and friends at home.When they return to Cameroon it then allows them to stay connected to their friends and associates in the US. Jende's business will connect him to the US and if not Neni's education then the education of their children will take them to the US, or Canada or Great Britain. At the end of the narrative, Jende can act on the reasoning that he expressed already in the first half of the book when still being one of the dreamers:

So they sat beneath the statue of Christopher Columbus, side by side, … In his first days in America, it was here he came every night to take in the city. It was here he often sat to call her when he got so lonely and homesick that the only balm that worked was the sound of her voice. During those calls, he would ask her how Liomi was doing, what she was wearing, what her plans for the weekend were, and she would tell him everything, leaving him even more wistful for the beauty of her smile, the hearth in his mother's kitchen, the light breeze at Down Beach, the tightness of Liomi's hugs. The coarse jokes and laughter of his friends as they drank Guinness at the drinking spot; leaving him craving everything he wished he hadn't left behind. During those times, he told her, he often wondered if leaving home in search of something as fleeting as fortune was ever worthwhile. (*Behold the Dreamers* 95–96)

It is from the core of the US-American cultural and social monopoly on immigration, legalization, and naturalization that Columbus Circle symbolizes, that the Jonga's departure from New York destabilizes the notion of the US as the center of a globalized world and the standard for measuring and judging a successful life. A transnational novel, *Behold the Dreamers* foregrounds the economic and legal conditions of transnational migration and transnational citizenship and questions the price tag attached to the American Dream for working immigrants. The characters emerge as transmigrants who compare their life and prospects in the US to those of their hometown in Nigeria. Although they may not have much of a choice in legal terms, they nonetheless are able to choose their future and reconcile the transcultural markers of their identity within transnational locations that encompass the US and Nigeria—the global North and the global South—simultaneously.

#### **Works Cited**

**Citizenship and (State) Violence**

## **"Present Absentees, Weak-Kneed Nobodies"1**

Exile, Airport, and Non-Citizenship in Abdourahman Waberi's *Transit*

*Nasra Smith*

Borders are no longer sites to be crossed but lines that separate.  *Donald Black, The Geometry of Terrorism*

France is not Fanon's Other; he is *France's* Other. *Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man*

The settler-native relationship is a mass relationship. *Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth*

In Abdourahman Waberi's *Transit* (2012), L'Aéroport de Roissy-Charles de Gaulle is an international transitory zone separate from, yet part of, France's territorialized border. As a heterotopic space,2 Roissy underscores the imperial epoch of *Fortress Europe.* Its stringent immigration policies and mobility control3 overwrite the air-

1 Harbi's comment about his exilic presence at the Roissy airport in France (Waberi 134).

2 In "Of Other Spaces," Foucault states a "heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public space" (25). I argue the airport is not a public place but a heterotopic space.

3 I borrow this term from Robert Pallitto and Josiah Heyman: their article argues that mobility control underscores how the extensity of checkpoints are, not only an effect of post-9/11 securitization but challenges to our theorizations about citizenship and identity (316).

port4 to underscore the "official assimilationism accompanying the French idea of citizenship"5 (Sekyi-Otu, *Left* 58). Complicit of France's colonial legacy, Roissy is the modern, globalized site of the French empire. It marks itself as a "confessional" complex that monitors and differentiates the movements and identities of bodies in a post-9/11 milieu (Salter 49). Reinforced by America's War on Terror, the Paris aéroport is a panopticon that militates technologies of surveillance over citizens and non-citizens6 alike (Foucault, *Discipline* 195; *Left* 58). As an autonomous state apparatus, the airport legitimates the national citizen, enacting a permanent partiality towards the Other. Thus, by carefully mapping, surveilling, and inspecting the non-status, the airport naturalizes its imperial vocabulary of territorial control to expel the refugee—whom Ato Sekyi-Otu quips as the "catastrophic return of the repressed" (*Left* 58).

*Transit* fictionalizes the effects of transnational migration and globalization on the East African migrant from the coast. By questioning how racial-colonial-capital inequalities reproduce hierarchical power through a geographically defined site, the novel challenges any obscuring of the connection between racism and capitalism.Given the mobility of global accumulation has produced the underdevelopment

4 I want readers to integrally note the airport as a port, like a seaport, or an inland port, etc. While not all ports are surveilled, the airport is regulated border. As a transportation site of people, goods, and services that has, overtime, turned into a securitized zone of the nation-state, where territoriality is key in instituting its national sovereignty, the modern airport inscribes the limits of travel for the non-status claimant.

5 I agree with Ato Sekyi-Otu's analysis of the 2005 Paris Riots, where he critiques a visiting French scholar to Canada who applauded Canada's stance against Islamic Sharia courts and other faith-based cases as a welcoming retribution. This scholar rebuked Canada's tradition of multiculturalism as inherently unsustainable. In this chapter, Sekyi-Otu addresses the scholar's remarks by analyzing the young history of Canada's multicultural policies, while admonishing France's *mission civilisantrice*. In short, Sekyi-Otu argues the scholar's argument is couched in assimilationist rhetoric that has governed the French polity since colonization.

6 As terms used in Citizenship Studies, I interchange asylum seeker, refugee, and non-status to describe the migratory status of claimants in a host country. In the field, the terms alien and non-citizen are used interchangeably, often denoting the legal precarity of entrants. In the past, terms like foreigner and stranger often evoked an exilic existence in travel narratives, where some were privileged or carried forms of social status (émigré as Edward Said and stranger/expatriate as per James Baldwin), and others were forced or differentiated. Engin Isin uses the terms foreigner, stranger, and outsider to inculcate how dominant forms of citizenship in the Roman and Greek metropolis were formed. As well, the term non-status has recently been theorized in Indigenous Studies, where borders, through European map-making, have shifted to exclude and/or impose on Indigenous communities the loss of their territorial sovereignty. I do differentiate between the non-status and the immigrant, for the latter usually denotes the acceptance into a country and the waiting process for citizenship of that country. But I use both terms to discuss the issues that plague the refugee at the airport and the immigrant in France. .

of the global South, mass migration not only augments the airport as a space of modernity, but replicates the colonial relations between the colonizer and the colonized (Davidson 5). Ato Quayson would agree the airport mimics forms of "colonial space-making" as the (im)migrant (unwillingly or willingly) consents to "forms of subversive complicity" as would the colonized in the context of imperial-colonial dominance (16; 17).Thus, colonial power is evident, not only through territorial control, but in relations of the "cultural and symbolic … [and the] political and spatial" (16). As a result, "the postcolonial nation-state, the ex-colonial metropolitan centres and predatory multinational corporations are all taken to be inheritors and beneficiaries of colonial space-making in the modern world" (17). In the context of migration and diaspora, Waberi articulates the failures of Djibouti's anti-colonial struggle, instantiating the metropolitan as a hyper-colonized space where racial difference, particularly France's vehemence towards the post-colonized migrant, is a division waged both materially and ideologically.

As such, the novel ties two formerly colonized subjects to Roissy to politicize a terrorizing post-civil war nation caught in the never-ending conflicts of the Greater Horn region. Migrating from Djibouti to the French metropolis, Harbi and Bashir are the globalized littoral subjects from the Indian Ocean. As *apatrides*, they centralize the "very real histories" of colonization, decolonization, and global capitalism (Treacy 64). Their transit, their mobility, does not erase Djibouti's postcolonial crises, but stresses it as "consequence of the colonial legacy" (64). In fact, Harbi's acknowledgement of Bashir, (while they are on French soil), heightens the dawning possibility of a post-dictatorial Africa (64). Given a "new and inventive language of resistance," Waberi delegitimizes France's *mission civilisantrice* via the non-status refugee (Treacy 64, 65; Sekyi-Otu, *Dialectics*119; *Left* 58; Fanon, *Wretched* 147). By centering the migrant—who is between detention, deportation, and death—, the novel decenters the annihilating power of France's sovereignty. For if the 'act' of constituting oneself as a citizen is akin to the act of liberating oneself from the colonizer, Harbi's acceptance of Bashir—his fight for another's freedom—subverts their subalterned predicament.Roissyis a post-imperial setting complicatedin *Transit* to question the legacies of French coloniality against the existence and survival of its *former* East African colony.

In the displaced refugee-emplaced citizen dyad, the novel synoptically creates a tension between the airport and citizenship to inscribe the migrant as the only recourse against Europe's absolute subjection of the Other. Rather than reiterate the perils of transnational migration, *Transit* reflexively integrates a critical, collective consciousness to challenge normative frameworks of national citizenship. The novel connects, through a mistaken identity, Bashir, a young, foul-mouthed ex-soldier, and Harbi,7 a placid, anti-regime intellect, to arrive at Roissy's *zone d'attente* (holding area, cell, detention center). While in a state of liminality, their internalized monologues augur the tropes of migrant surveillance and the (im)mobilities of exile from a war-torn country (Treacy 73). Roissy arguably shapes their non-status identification, yet Harbi and Bashir "seize the silences, the refusals, and [their] flight as something active" (Moulier-Boutang 227). They counter the airport as an authorial site that territorializes citizenship, and in that "moment" that they assert themselves, regardless of "status and substance, [they] constitute themselves as citizens—or better still, as those to whom the right to have rights is due" (Isin 276, qtd. in Nyers 161–62). Insisting non-citizens are political actors rather than threatening *immigrés*when they assert, realize,or "act"on their rights,Engin Isin adds "becoming political is that moment when one constitutes oneself as being capable of judgment about just or unjust, takes responsibility for that judgment, and associates oneself with or against others in fulfilling that responsibility" (276). Peter Nyers also states, "to self-identify as a non-status person is to engage in an act of citizenship" (163). To be clear, Harbi or Bashir do not protest nor are forcibly abused at Roissy, but the fear of deportation is always imminent for the migrant. The very idea of deportation engenders Harbi's acceptance of Bashir as his son. Essentially, it validates the "principle of equality" often undone by the laws of "pure citizenship" (native born) versus "borrowed citizenship (one that, less secure from the start, is now not safe from forfeiture)" (Mbembe, *Necro* 3). If Harbi's act is a counter-discourse that critiques the link between imperial violence and modern democracies today, then in that "moment" where "freedom becomes responsibility and obligation becomes a right," Harbi and Bashir become agentic mediators (*Necro* 23; Isin 276; 275; Salter 49). As a non-citizen, Harbi's concealment of Bashir's false identity becomes "the only courageous act" against his homeland's terrifying present and the host-nation's colonial stance (Waberi 141).

Full of tensions, the novel interrogates the ways in which African geographies of war and uneven development manifest the displacement of the African subject. Since Waberi challenges all forms of borders—the colonizer versus the colonized, the global North versus the global South, the developed world versus the under-developed, etc.—Achille Mbembe and Frantz Fanon's theories of the border and colo-

7 Harbi in *Transit* might be an invocation of Mahmoud Harbi, an Issa-Somali who advocated against French rule, forming the Union of Republicans (UR). As a resistance party, they withdrew their support from Somali and Arab communities (in Djibouti) to gain independence from France and unify instead with Somalia. Winning their first election over territory in 1958, UR divested the support of France, conditioning national politics in the parliament towards a Pan-Somali movement. Yet in the second referendum in 1959, the Afar, for fear of the alliance of the Issa-Somalis with Somalia, joined forces with the colonial government and eventually cemented the path towards French control. Despite another uprising for independence in 1966, France held power in Djibouti till its independence in 1977.

nial space helps translate the racist/fascist phantasmagoria of *Fortress Europe*. In this paper, I center the airport as a global, transnational space, where its technologies of control complicate any easy readings of colonial mimicry. I explore how Harbi and Bashir's restorative act(s) of citizenship illuminate the airport as an apparatus of territorial power almost analogous to a 'carceral archipelago.' At the heart of my argument is the plight of the East African subject caught in the racial-colonial-capital modes of global circulation that wields a "planetary renewal of colonial relations" to continuously immobilize coastal East African nations (Mbembe,*Out* 4). For these reasons, this paper is divided into two sections: a theoretical inquiry of the postcolony through various concepts—citizenship, airport, and the (im)migrant as enemy—and a textual analysis of *Transit*.

#### **Acts of Citizenship**

Harbi's "courageous act" is a very complex act of citizenship (Waberi 141). As a political act, it is not neutral, nor linear or simple, but spiral and circuitous in its transgressive power.That is, the novel arrives at this "act" through the subject's dialectical struggle against globalization. As a migrant narrative, *Transit* infers the precarity of the African immigrant navigating the brutal realities of alienation and displacement in a foreign land. Although the subjects are conditioned by the loss of home, Harbi's decision, and Bashir's willingness to go along with it, involves change. It signifies action, not only in the taking back of power (i.e., speaking back to the empire), but in the totality of the 'act,' the refugee's praxis signifies their heterogeneous narratives, not their migration or citizenship status. In so doing, Waberi circumvents the flow of migration to disrupt the France-Djibouti corridor. However, Roissy's immigration policies can curtail Harbi and Bashir's 'moment of entry' into metropolitan France. In fact, the aéroport strategically regulates a myriad of surveillance assemblages to make "resistance such a challenge"(Salter 63). Salter asks: "what are the politics of resistance at the airport, beyond the romanticism of the global nomad or the protest of specific policies?" (63). Notwithstanding Salter's critique, I argue Harbi's act, his *resistance*, already counters Roissy in his refusal to 'compromise' at the colony (*Wretched* 62).Harbi's act and Bashir's determination transform the embassy and the airport into contested spaces where the refugee can counter, negotiate, and redefine relations of power.

Is Harbi's "courageous act" a decolonial act? I ask this possibility because Harbi constitutes himself and Bashir as 'citizens,' and by this virtue, absolves Bashir as the product of post-independence failure.8 By countering Djibouti's failed decolonial struggle, Harbi's 'immediate' act, then at the colony, and now at the white man's border, at the settler's place, is *his fight for recognition.* According to Jean Khalfa, any act of liberation is an "antagonistic process of recognition," and as consciousness gains recognition of itself in opposition with the another,it becomes an "Other (*autrui*) and not simply the other" (45, emphasis original). Noting Fanon's discourse of de- colonization, does Harbi's act challenge the hierarchies of power at Roissy? Perhaps not fully, but it does confront—quietly—the lure of France for Djiboutis. To some extent, Harbi's act propels him to shape his reality and counter the colonizer, so one truly "*exists*" (Khalfa 45, emphasis original). However, a true act of liberation, Foucault would argue, is only possible when the "*practice of freedom*" is "grounded on and arises out of the self-formative ethos of a people" (*Ethics* 2, emphasis original). That is, freedom is only possible when the collective action of the people wields a process of becoming (Serequerberhan 68; 89). Harbi and Bashir's acts of courage do not propel the young nation towards decolonization, but they do confront Djibouti's colonial heritage. By countering France's dominance over the postcolonized,Waberi illuminates the underbelly of Djibouti's underdevelopment and political corruption is a result of its "neocolonial independence [which is] a *de facto* extension of [French] colonialism" (89).

Harbi and Bashir's presence at Roissy not only conjures France's colonial past, but its racial present. Achille Mbembe argues the politics of racism in the metropolis "is the driver of necropolitical principle" (*Necro* 38). If so, then Europe's crisis against the immigrant Other is based on racial difference—what Fanon called "negrophobia" (*Necro* 38; *Wretched* 183). Harbi and Bashir's difference then, their "fact of blackness," leaves them doubly alienated, subjected, and viewed through a process of "projective non-seeing" (*Black Skins* 109; Gordon 24).  Gordon writes, if "perception is a function of an historical condition," then the dominant gaze sees the black for his "blackness," or his "darkness," thus conditioning his struggle for ontology (24). Therefore, a difference exists between the black non-citizen from the "dominated, stigmatized, oppressed, marginalized, and disenfranchised" non-citizen as per Isin (276). By their existential inferiority—race and the persistence of (colonial) racism—the African, worse than the brown or Arab immigrant from a former French colony, is considered a "plague" (*Discipline* 195). According to Foucault, if "measures are to be taken when the plague appeared in a town," then like the brown

8 Although Bashir is considered a symbol of postcolonial failure, Fanon would have called him an"honest intellectual" whom might have led to a"healthier outlook for the nation"(*Wretched* 177).

or Arab immigrant, the black endures symbolic violence at the metropolis (195). As a result, the formerly colonized black can *never* be French, nor can the formerly colonized Arab *ever* be French. To put it another way, the non-status at the airport can *never* or *ever* have rights. As such, Isin observes that while there are "always spaces for becoming political [by] … transversing strategies and technologies of citizenship inventively and imaginatively," they cannot be interpreted as "continuous or 'revolutionary'" (279). Rather, citizenship is acquired when "time and again groups establish their rights … as direct inheritors of historical forms of citizenship" (279). As airports exercise greater surveillant practices, Roissy becomes the border of racial tension and the "dividing line" regulated by "the language of pure force" (*Wretched* 38; 38). The non-status/immigrant, then, is considered, like the colonized native, an "absolute evil," a *negation* and an "enemy of values" (41). Consequently, Harbi and Bashir's acts counter the neocolonial subterfuge of France's anti-immigration policies but also call into question the formation of the Other as enemy (Isin 275; *Necro* 48). The "desire of the enemy," Mbembe argues, goes beyond the social desire to differentiate the citizen from the Other, but becomes the ontological crisis of the (French) citizen (48).

Earlier, I argued Harbi's "courageous act" is a political act, but Isin would add any "act of citizenship" grounds the non-status to be "implicated in the strategies and technologies of citizenship as otherness" (275). Constituted as outsiders, aliens, and strangers, the non-status must contest those who have inculcated their political belonging, agency, and community (282; 275).9 Though citizenship has always succumbed to a "logics of exclusion and enclosure," Isin reminds us that dominant groups were hardly "revolutionary in the sense of being spontaneous, radical, and rapid overthrows," and since the "moments of being political were polyvalent, multiple,minor…,"it signifies no act of citizenship is too small (282).This means Harbi's act is not nominal nor can be considered void of mobilization, because its effect was self-affirming to him and life-affirming to Bashir. In other words, if 'becoming political' are those moments where the status quo is "reversed, transvalued and redefined," then we can say Harbi's acceptance of Bashir (when questioned by an immigration official) is the very act of being political—his immediate act of speaking up

9 In in his final chapter, Isin emphasizes that groups that politically conscripted their rights not only became "direct inheritors of historical forms of citizenship," but their ascendency naturally eroded and thwarted the autonomy of other groups in the civitas (279). However, their mobilization was circumstantial because they self-prescribed to gain political participation (280). In other words, those who gained access befitted themselves not only as those "capable of being political," but also endowed themselves "with the capacity to be governed by and govern other citizens" (280). Isin establishes the dominant groups were not revolutionary nor radical in their ascendency, but they "certainly wished to present it that way" (280). Therefore, we must critique the "grand narratives" of historical citizenship as it is no longer the "game of the dominant few" (281–282).

(276). As a non-citizen, Harbi performs a subversive act that embodies or "provokes acts of speaking against injustice and vocalizing grievances as equal beings" (277). Isin adds that "when the natural order of domination is interrupted by … those who have no part," and as they confront and defy dominant discourses, then these forms of mobilizing, assembling, or becoming an ally with others, automates change (277). It is in these activistic reversals that the vision for citizenship is enacted to counter whose who are privileged and accustomed to benefits.

Since citizenship naturally produces modes of Othering,it is contradictory in its social and semantic formations. Acts of non-citizenship politicize the non-status to contest formal citizenship. Nyers argues that "claim making" and "right taking" by non-citizens legitimize these groups "*without* any mobilization" from other established organizations (160; 161). Adumbrated by their precarity, these "moments" catapult non-citizens to publicly frame their "rights, membership, freedom and equality" in social spaces where they were historically excluded, and still are in our contemporary world (161). Nyers asks, "what kinds of acts of citizenship would allow for no one to be illegal?"(162). By publicly engaging their "political act" to constitute their citizenship, not by moral plea, nor by defying conceptual and legal ramifications of citizenship do these persons or groups claim 'non-status,' but by *action*, they take to task institutions of power (162). Nyers establishes that the non-status centralize these contradictions—between law and necessity, between reason and reality—to acquire freedom. It follows that Nyers connects agency to "voice," arguing that "to act is to put something into motion, to create something new" (163). According to Isin, to act then is to verily subvert historical citizenship, and whether it is "authored or anonymous,intended or accidental,individual or collective," the non-status refugee has challenged their social, political, and legal realities (qtd. in Nyers 163).That "moment" of the act, transcendental yet veritable in destabilizing the status quo, produces these "actors/subjects," and as Isin reminds us, "acts produce actors that do not exist before acts" (qtd. in Nyers 163).

#### **The Airport and Non-Citizenship**

Modern airports totalize their institutional power, thus conditioning the *desire* for citizenship. The geometries of security and policing legitimize the French airport as an exemplary, sovereign world beyond "the limits of the political," thus, fraternizing its codified language of enmity, racism, and death against the Other *(Necro* 70). It is an *excess of power* that "continuously refers and appeals to the exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of the enemy" (70). As a port of entry that accepts, confines, or denies entrance to the traveler/migrant/claimant, the airport inscribes the judicial power of the nation over the Other. For instance, the border officer—mercifully or mercilessly—substantiates entry through its legal statures, yet can also discriminately impose "the laws of autochthony and common origin" over the new claimant (*Necro* 3). For these reasons, the airport is a contentious, intersecting space that marries the governmentalities of the state with the contemporary realities of its site as a national border of citizenship. While it is a global port of transnationalism and a *de facto* international zone of travel, it is also a real, physical space that maps itself into a modern, federalized security system (especially after 9/11). As an active geographic site of differentiation, it implicates the (im)migrant subject. Robert Davidson calls airports "spaces of immigration" because they wield their totalising power over the "global migration regime" (3; Salter 50).10 As such, the airport grounds its carceral logics of discipline and punishment to produce a "strict spatial partitioning" that encloses some, while opening others to feelings of joy, adventure, and homecoming (*Discipline* 195; Lisle 3). Foucault presents the basic formula of an enclosure: it is a "segmented, immobile, frozen space," where the gaze is "everywhere" and "functions ceaselessly" (*Discipline* 195). Surveillance is not only centralized and operates through a "permanent registration" where individuals are "observed at every point," but the subjects are ordered and regimented, for "visibility is a trap" (195; 197; 200). Given the hidden, disciplinary practices of the prison, Foucault argues its major effect on the subject is "to induce in the inmate [insert *deportee*] a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power" (201, emphasis added*)*. While the panopticon conditions, "automatizes and disindividualizes power," Salter would argue the airport disperses power by surveilling "dangerous objects, not dangerous individuals" (202; 51). Airport surveillances are decentralized as they calculate risk based on "frequency and impact," and requiring a "balance between mobility and security," there is usually an "incompleteness" of control that leads to its "unreliability"—an issue starkly

10 Harbi and Bashir, as visible bodies occupying the airport, presuppose the dialogue between space, place, and citizenship, in what Robert Davidson calls the "spaces of immigration" (3). As interdictive spaces, Davidson would argue the airport is conditioned by pre-emptive and post-emptive practices of border control, regulation, and management (5). If interdiction is the "act of prohibiting, intercepting … [and] deflecting unauthorized movement," then the state exercises absolute control despite the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees which mandates signatory nations to grant asylum (Nyers 5). Certainly, in the novel's prologue, Harbi and Bashir narrate the deportation of African refugees by articulating a set of interdictive practices in which state authority displaces refugees, and how, ultimately, these exercises of power psychically affect them. Interdictive methods, some anticipatory and others insidiously legitimized, raise questions about how much a state aggressively creates "migration zones where the rights of asylum seekers are lessened or eliminated" (Davidson 5). Roissy, as a fixed and recognized border, serves as an example of France's "national environment" (5). Thus, the airport maps out "a state's outright excision of its own national space" (6). Davidson notes how state authority "perforates itself by selectively leaving areas of its space exposed to international jurisdiction," and ultimately, it only functions to detain and deport refugee claimants (6).

clear between the rhetoric of unacceptability (of terrorism) and its "unavoidable" reality (51). In other words, this "disconnect" between control and risk does and can lead to a rhetoric of the claimant as dangerous (51). Quoting Bigo, Salter writes "mobility control has shifted 'from the control of and hunt for individual criminals… to the surveillance of so-called risk groups, defined by using criminology and statistics'" (qtd. in Salter 51).

For these reasons and more, the airport is a heterotopic, deviant space. It is a "curious property" because it can "suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect" (Foucault, *Other Spaces* 24). As it doubly "trac[es] the power relations that are continually forged and broken between subjects, objects, spaces, and meanings," Debbie Lisle claims power is produced at the airport (4). She asks, "what is *political* about the airport?" suggesting airports are spaces where "new forms of mediated power" emerge (3). In other words, the airport's interdictive practices emerge and re-emerge "in spaces that exceed the modern distinction of here/there,inside/outside, citizen/alien"(Davidson 5; Lisle 4). Marc Auge also theorized the airport is a "supermodern" site;11 it is a 'non-place' that inscribes a trinary process of alterity, precarity and temporality (qtd. in Lisle 6; Auge 25). It represents "an overload of signs" and through a "combination of excessive meaning and compressed space," its overfamiliarity encourages our passivity (6). For this reason, it cannot sustain a dialectics of meaning for the traveler visiting, the citizen, or the non-citizen, due to its "hypersignification" (7). According to Lisle, airports are "sites of destabilization, ambiguity, and constant movement," for "just as people never stay at airports, neither does power" (4). Not a public place, nor a space of centralized power, but as a "negative space of banality," Lisle argues Auge's theorization evacuates power, overlooking moments where "significations and spaces coalesce to form an oppressive hegemonic formation" (7).

For the refugee, citizenship begins at the airport. Therefore, it is a scary border because it can consent the terrorizing of the (im)migrant Other. In the epilogue, Harbi explainsmigrants are "terrified by the administrativemessinherentin the European, my brothers discovering some legal refinement their colonial education had never touched on" (Waberi 134). Earlier, I called the airport a 'carceral archipelago,' in part due to the post-9/11 rhetoric that demands an accommodationist language of policy and strategy in their naming of the Other. In another, the border is a critical geography that imposes the imperial-sovereign rights of the West to be circumspect of the migrant from politically charged countries. Since Somalia is a geographical substrate of the troubling Greater Horn, Djibouti's proximity to it inheres the accretions of the region's regimes of political corruption and Islamic fundamentalism.

11 Noting its various spatial configurations, the airport is not a "place of memory" (anthropological), but a "frequented place," "a geometric space," and "an existential space" where "the scene of an experience of relations with the world" are observed (Auge 25).

Despite arriving from one of France's strongholds, the Djibouti(im)migrantis examined through a quasi-military "sovereign right to kill," where the airport invariably acts as a heterochrony12 to carry out "a set of obscure policies and practices" for the "containment of deviant, mobile subjects" (*Other Spaces* 23;*Necro* 70; Salter 49; 52). To examine this another way, given the excesses of globalization have broadened and diversified our migratory pathways, the "new swarming" from populations of the south—"the planet's centers of poverty"—to the metropolitan have passed from the "*human condition*" to the "*terrestrial condition*" (*Necro* 13; 12; 13, emphasis original). In the novel, the deportation of other Africans from Roissy signifies the (im)migrant is not only conceived as a terrorist but also as the bestial Other. The vague, indifferent notion of the Other is further produced by the "security assemblage{s]" that regulate the border (Salter 50). Mbembe concedes that borders are now a detonating zone of biopower in our late modernity, not between the citizen and the terrorist, but between the citizen and the non-citizen seen as a terrorist because of their claimant status (*Necro* 71). For "in the calculus of biopower," the airport divides people "into those who must live and those who must die" (71). While Foucault nor Mbembe directly critique the airport, Mbembe asserts the border is determined by a nocturnal politics that delimits democratic ideals in lieu of the militarization of the nation-state. In other words, the airport functions as a critical site of hegemony that expedites, through design and function, the "constitutive elements of state power" (Salter 53; *Necro* 71).

Harbi and Bashir's observations of Roissy are never neutral nor objective, and their narratives are compartmentalized into two worlds of the citizen and the non-citizen. Reading Fanon's concept of space in the colony, I suggest the modern airport is a colonial zone/space of control and coercion. As the colony spatially separated the colonized from the colonizer, the airport, in its transplantation of power in our contemporary world, adheres to a form of colonial division (*Wretched* 36). Divided into compartments, the colonial system is a world cut into two, as a "dividing line" is between the "established order" and the Other, in order to create in the "exploited person," an "atmosphere of submission" (38). The colonial border, therefore, is lineated through "frequent and direct action" by an intermediary, who "does not lighten the oppression" (38). By following the "principle of reciprocal exclusivity," this dividing line is a chasm, "two zones" that are not complementary to each other, nor in service towards one goal, but diametrically and ontologically

12 I want to add that the airport is an empty space of architectural and technological wonder until a mobile population flows into discrete and separated zones of entry and exit according to time and destination: "the heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time" (Salter 53; *Other Spaces* 26). Therefore, the competing relations of power, consumption, and competition make visible or invisible the plethora of bodies present: staff, travelers, and the law (53).

opposed (38). One zone is superior to the other, the settler's town (read: the citizen) is "brightly lit … well-fed, … an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things" (39). The other zone is "hungry," "a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute" (39). The division between the colonial and native zones is demarcated by its panopticon design: "they have surrounded the native city; they have laid siege to it. Every exit … opens up on enemy territory" (Fanon, *Dying* 50). If the vocabulary of colonial division—i.e., the history of imperial subjugation—inhabits modern institutions of power (the nation-state, the carceral state, the global economy), then the colony is the genesis of the "sovereign right to kill" (*Necro* 78). Mbembe warns: the sovereign right to kill "is not subject to any rule in the colonies," and because of this, it reserves the right to "kill at any time or in any manner" (*Necro* 78).

The airport is border policing par excellence. In *Fortress Europe*, the border is akin to the guillotine in the desire to exterminate the immigrant Other. Fortified by the state's anticipatory and expansive methods of exclusion against potential refugees, a separation wall keeps the "swarming" of migrants from these nations at death's door—i.e., *the border* (*Necro* 13).13 *Transit* avows the border emerges and remerges to strangle the migrant. It signifies the total negation of the subject, as Roissy coalesces France's imperial past and neocolonial present into a new proverbial anxiety—the extraction of theimmigrantOther.Corbin Treacy prescribes Roissy as "a site of paradox"—a "gateway," a transnational space created by the global flow of capital, labour, and communication that legislates the territorialization of the nation-state while legitimizing a homogenized, deterritorialized place for those with "the right passports from the right countries" (63; 64). A "*gate*" that arrests and punishes those outside the purview of the national citizen exposes its own arbitrary power in defining (and redefining) the non-citizen (64, emphasis original; Isin 276). Treacy explains it well: "the immigrant's very presence is a challenge both to the relics of *la veille Europe inquiéte* ("old and worried Europe") and the newly designed structures of control and surveillance (*Zones d'attentes*, *Centres de retention administrative*, *Centres de detention administrative*, "les lois et les policies")" (73, emphasis original*).* By suppressing, containing, and regulating "the incoming wave of immigrants from the former colonies," Treacy contemplates "if its capacity for bureaucratic triage is pushed to a breaking point, it may have to rethink the (il)logic of attempting to determine one group of people as "regularized" 'normalized' and another as "cladestins" 'illegal' (especially when these arriving migrants come from the former colonies)" (74). Neither French citizens nor Djibouti residents, Harbi and Bashir are transit subjects. Racialized and marginalized, they are "border-artists … hoarder[s] of hyphen" (Kumar 34). Governed by their temporality, they are spatialized subjects. As they occupy

13 In *Discipline and Punish*, Foucault numerates these "physical," punitive penalties: "imprisonment, confinement, forced labour, penal servitude, prohibition from entering certain areas, deportation"—which have occupied so important a place in modern penal systems.

real, physical borders such as the airport, they become mediators caught between a struggling Djibouti and a racially charged France. By this extension, Harbi and Bashir's exilic, yet "arrested nomadism" derides France's protection of its territory while it historically annexed other territories in the global South (Treacy 64).

#### **The Immigrant as Enemy**

The postcolony weighs heavily in *Transit*. With the protagonists trapped in France yet psychically bound to Djibouti, the novel's setting is a colonial aperture that hinders their mobility. Not only does it challenge France's denial of its colonial past, it underscores its continuity. In *Out of the Dark Night*, Mbembe asks: "why does France stubbornly refuse to critically think about the *postcolony* [?]" (90, emphasis original). As such, *Transit* ignites a rethinking of France and its former colonies. Precisely, France'sinability to think about the postcolonyis a result ofits republicanmodel(*Out* 90). In its assent, it has underwritten out those difference from the white, French citizen, and "its originary capacity for brutality, discrimination, and exclusion" now makes France *exit* from an affective vocabulary of humanity towards those they consider the Other (*Out* 90; 91; *Necro* 9). In much the same way the American republic constitutionally relegated the Other—the enslaved, the Indigenous—outside of its logics for liberty, the French republic adheres to its repressive colonial-assimilationist model. In its reluctance to extend representation to its formerly colonized subjects, the border is instituted to hold them out as the enemy (*Out* 90;*Necro* 48). In other words,in the somatics of migration, the airport legitimatizes national identity and discourse,what Davidson describes as the "shifting coordinates of the 'national'" (3). Mbembe explains its social effect in France: "the figure of the 'Muslim' or the 'immigrant' that dominates public discourse is never the figure of a full-fledged 'moral subject,' but is based on devaluating categories that treat 'Muslims' and 'immigrants' like 'an indistinct mass'" (*Out* 104). "This way of dividing people," explains Mbembe, is a result of the French civic model, where the "racial question" and the "question of Islam" are already codified in its national rhetoric (104). Newcomers, therefore, are duty-bound to "integrate into an identity that already exists and that is offered to them like a gift, in return for which they must show recognition—'respect for our own foreignness'" (104).14 Mbembe notes how calling into question France's "ethnic and racializing foundations" inheres the difficulty of a modern nation-state to move beyond its inaugural elucidations of a French citizen (104).

Precisely, Mbembe argues France has advanced its resistance to the (historical) veracity of colonial violence on autochthonous societies, thus reproducing its current mobilization against the non-Western Other (112). By placing this crisis as

14 Mbembe quotes Julia Kristeva (*Strangers* 154).

a "disease," a matrix of separation and extermination to rid of the Other through forms of disappearance, expulsion, and differentiation, Mbembe situates the *desire* for the border as part of the anxiety of the loss of fantasy in dominating the Other, the *master-desire* (*Out* 131; 132; *Necro* 43, emphasis added). In *Necropolitics*, Mbembe describes the *master-desire* or simply "*desire* (master or otherwise)" as the master-slave relation that is brought into a multiplicity of differences from one object to the other—from the colonized/enslaved to the immigrant/refugee (43). For instance, Mbembe relates that "Negro" and "Jew" were oft the favoured names in the past, and today, they are known by other names: "*Islam, the Muslim, the Arab, the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee, the intruder, to mention only a few*" (*Necro* 43, emphasis added). As a result, the citizen's desire is to "protect itself from external danger … to conquer this terrifying object," despite the "object" never actually existing (43). These intensely driven fantasies, what Mbembe collectively signals as "the desire for an enemy, the desire for apartheid (for separation and enclaving), [and] the fantasy of extermination" are all states of abstraction that translate fantasies of separation into realistic action (43). A border wall can be sufficient "enough to express such [a] desire": "a separation wall is supposed to resolve a problem of excess of presence, the very presence that some see as the origin of situations of unbearable suffering" (43). Therefore, the need to expel the enemy, *a.k.a*. the immigrant, helps to regain *this* loss (of domination). By grounding the difference between the citizen and the migrant, mass fantasies reduce the immigrant to a *thing* and thereby gain absolute control.Mbembe explains the extensity of this psychoanalytical crisis: "To regain the feeling of existing henceforth depends on breaking with that excess presence, whose absence (or … disappearance pure and simple) will by no means be felt as a loss" (43).The *loss* here simultaneously reveals the irrational dependence on the prejudice or the object of that prejudice. It also reveals the fear of their internalized hatred towards a pro-immigration nation-state. In practice, this schema not only weakens the immigrant in their quest for citizenship but reinforces the meta-discourse about the Other as a beast, as an animal, and as a spectacle.

As Mbembe observes, French patriotism ignites the desire for borders. In turn,it actualizes neorevisionist policies that severely regulate ports of entry—air,land, and sea—through pre-emptive and post-emptive interdiction practices (*Out* 131; Davidson 5–6). By standardizing "pure" (native-born) citizenship through a normative, absolutist inversion of law and equality, for instance, the building of "security barriers"—checkpoints, enclosures, watchtowers, trenches, and other random and permanent structures—imposes "a regime of separation" while waging a "proximate intimacy" with the Other (*Out* 131;*Necro* 44). As an elementary system, the border is the most "primitive form of keeping at bay enemies, intruders, and strangers—all those who are not one of us" (45; 3). Thus, the desire for apartheid through the border systematizes the repressed discourse of the Other through social language and political practice. In other words,it revives the "French disease of colonization," bent on evoking the "very identity of France" to stand for the salvation of *Fortress Europe* (*Out* 131). Contemptuously, this disease "arises out of the confrontation between two antagonistic desires: "the *desire*—supported by a nebulous neorevisionist movement—for borders and for the control of identities, and … the desire for symbolic recognition and expansion of a *citizenshipinabeyance*, [thatis] defended… byminorities and those who support them" (131–2, emphasis original*).* At the metropolitan center, the dispossession the immigrant feels is a process mired by the "severe policing of identi-

ties" and the extensity of interdictive practices on all French border sites (133). The desire for the border, and its function for dominative mass fantasies, requires an understanding of the enemy as one who exists concretely, not conceptually—essentially as "the other that I am" (*Necro* 48-49). This drive or need, Mbembe details, is no longer a "social need" but a projection of militarized, fascist, racist, and nationalist forces of enmity, what he calls "the society of enmity" (42). Mbembe admonishes an adherence to concepts over the reality of racial fantasy, arguing, psychoanalytically, this reality derives from the "discrimination between friend and enemy" (48–49). He stresses the distinction: "the concept of the enemy is to be understood in its concrete and existential meaning, and not at all as a metaphor or as an empty and lifeless abstraction"(49). In other words, the desire for an enemy is always present and serves as a vector for the racial intolerance of the Other. The enemy is not a rival nor a competitor, but one who endures the "supreme antagonism" of the dominant citizen—especially those who ascribe to the nostalgic fantasies of racial domination (49). By exteriorizing these fantasies, "in both body and flesh, the enemy is that individual whose physical death is warranted by his existential denial of our own well-being" (49). For immigrants, the many gradations of intolerance rise from the facile certainties of racial hierarchy. While visible and non-visible minorities, at times, are both referred through this simple schema of racial fantasy, the enemy, often,isidentified with "accuracy"(49). For asintolerance thrivesin secrecy, suspicion, and conspiracy, the "desire to destroy" is usually activated when an arena of nationalist hostility is present (49). Mbembe reminds us that the enemy *at once* has a face and does not have a face: "A disconcerting figure of ubiquity, the enemy is henceforth more dangerous by being everywhere: without face, name, or place. If the enemy has a face, it is only a *veiled face, the simulacrum of a face*" (49). Whether under the "aegis of the state" or through a singular deployment of physical extremity, the "hatred of the enemy" requires a need to "neutralize" at best, and at worst, to define them as a "permanent threat" (50). In other words, the immigrant Other is akin to a terrorist because our contemporary world is now a battlefield of the enemies of the state: "We have, it is true, always lived in a world deeply marked by diverse forms of terror … of squandering human life" (34). The immigrant Other is the new terrorist, and is, not only a threatening outsider, but a *thing* to be eradicated. Mbembe implores: "[c]an the Other, in light of all that is happening, still be regarded as my fellow creature?" (3).

#### *Transit:* **The Novel**

*Transit* is a series of monologues by Bashir Assoweh (a protagonist and an antagonist who knowingly calls himself Bashir Binladen), Mahmoud Harbi, and his deceased family: his father, Awaleh, his French wife, Alice, and his son, Abdo-Julien. The narratives vary from detailing a desert landscape replete with the contrive climate of a civil war, to the departed souls signifying the affairs of the spirit/body difference through a simulacrum of issues: French colonial policies, the history of Djibouti, and the political corruption of a small, arid nation on the Gulf of Aden. Perhaps motivated by the legal case, *Amuur v. France*, 15 or the eighteen-year stay at the Charles de Gaulle airport by Iranian immigrant, Merhan Karimi Nasseri (who died recently), 16 *Transit* might be an intertextual nod to their lives17. Either way, the

16 Merhan's death was announced on November 12, 2022. He died of a heart attack.

17 In their writing of Merhan Karimi Nasseri, Soguk and Whitehall centralized the airport as a "transit area," a metaphor for "the transversal condition of our being and becoming" (8; Soguk and Whitehall 678). Nasseri's exilic story, as told to four different newspapers, was detained for eleven years at Roissy Airport, from 1988 to 1999, because he could not provide a passport upon entry to United Kingdom, nor to France. According to Nasseri, his one-way ticket to London was upended by the passport being stolen at a Paris train station, yet Paris airport authority released him to travel to England. Upon arrival at Heathrow, British immigration officials rejected his entry and deported him back to Charles de Gaulle airport and he has remained here for eleven years (Daley). *New York Times*'s Suzanne Daley called Nasseri's story one of the most "bizarre stories in immigration history," while citing Merha's adaptation to the airport now makes it difficult to leave after his papers were finally processed (Daley). According to Soguk and Whitehall, Nasseri's (whom they refer to by his first name, Merhan) detention was due to the bureaucratic mistakes of passport and immigration officials. Forced to live, sleep, and eat at the airport, Nasseri survived on the kindness of airport workers and strangers.

15 *Amuur vs. France:* The legal case relates the story of four Somali nationals from Damascus on March 9, 1992. They were refused entry to France on the basis that their passports were falsified and were subsequently detained at Hotel Arcade. Adjacent to the Roissy airport, the Ministry of Interior rented a section of the hotel as a "waiting area" for the airport and the four claimants were detained there (Davidson 10; *Amuur v. France*). On March 25, the men were denied refugee status because they did not have temporary residence permits, and thus do not qualify for protection from the state. Despite applying for release of confinement from Hotel Arcade on March 26, the men were deported back to Syria three days later. The case was brought before the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled for "the contention that people in international zones had not technically entered the country and thus could not fall under Article 1 of the European Convention of Human Rights had no merit in respect to "jurisdiction" is defined [Mole 35]" (Davidson 10). According to the Court, an expulsion under Article 3 from the state is valid only when the state acts [35]. The Amuur case focused on the men's detention at Hotel Arcade, and as an "appended *de facto* to the international zone," the state's ruling was unlawful due to its rendering of the hotel in providing a transit zone for claimants and visitors.

novel's setting complicates *Transit*: it centralizes the French airport as an interstitial space of non-/citizenship, while scrutinizing the regional conflicts of the Horn of Africa. Roissy is the novel's physical setting, not Djibouti. Yet Djibouti is the novel's center, the space in which the characters reflect on their exilic existence, not France. In so doing, the novel prefigures the modern, global port—*the airport*—as the hyper-surveilled, securitized, and enforced border while the local port—*the coast—*is the novel's dialectical struggle of war and strife.

The novel concentrates on the Djibouti civil war (1991–1994) to show the country's rapacious colonial history is still, and always will be, its present. Indeed, the culmination of a one-party rule since 1977 produced a disastrous war between the Issa-led government and the Afar militia group FRUD.18 Exacerbated by the 1991 fallouts of dictator Siad Barre in Somalia and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia, the secession of Eritrea and Somaliland, and the continuing skirmishes between the two tribes, the civil war not only underscored severe ideological differences, but the nation's arrested development. Notwithstanding the legacy of French imperialism and its continuation of power in Djibouti ten to twenty years after the independence of many African nations, Hassan Gouled Aptidon's government became the final blow of the colonially sanctioned Issa-Somali dominance. Historically, the fallout between the colonial administration (French Somaliland) and the Afar over territory in 1882 (which solidified moving its colonial headquarters from the port of Obock on the Red Sea (Afar territory) to Djibouti City (closer to the Issa-Somalis) eventually led to no conceivable exit from Issa rule. Furthered by Djibouti's referendum to remain under French rule in 1966 and now with a weakened Horn region, the Afar insurgency was the degeneration of ethnic restructuring, colonial authority, and the assertion of territorial legitimacy and sovereignty. Needless to write, the civil war was a bitter reminder of the severity of inter-clan warfare and political corruption, but also the overt violence caused by decades of imperial-capital legacy. As Bashir states, "City says war no good, no good…But I don't agree. I say war too too good for sure," the novel institutes the enculturation of colonial genocide in Africa (Waberi 25).

The aftermaths of a civil strife is interweaved through the everyday, social spaces of Djibouti City as a capital.The "City," as Bashir unwittingly calls it, is a representational zone that incubates the ever-present French military base, an inter-dependent nation-state, an autarchic and dictatorial one-party ascendency, and a civil population teeming under the surface, almost vertiginous to the slightest political unrest. In Bashir's account, the city maps the intensely spatial corridors of a militarized state, often citing the technologies of war and the horrifying crimes committed by crooked generals and violent warlords. Certainly, Bashir's narrative navigates the aggressive modes of control over civilians—murder, hunger, destitution,

18 FRUD is an abbreviation of *Front pour le Restauration de l'Unité et la Démocratie*.

and rape—but it also mocks the idiocy of politicians so much that the translators of the novel, David Ball and Nicole Ball, consider his satiric chronicle "upbeat" and "funny" (xiii). Bashir's impressions of a war-torn society, replete with vernacular, broken French, much like Ken Saro-Wiwa's "incorrect, broken English" in *Sozaboy*, write the translators, is a "spoken" rather than a "written" language (xii). Though, unlike *Sozaboy*, Bashir's narrative is a "faux-naif," a technique in satire used to "deflate political pretense" (xiii). Nonetheless inspired by Saro-Wiwa's first-person narrative of (civil) war, *Transit* both illuminates and complicates Bashir as an ex-soldier, whose wit, charm, and ignorance is juxtaposed by Harbi's intellectual transfiguration of French colonialism and East Africa's postcolonial malaise.

As a political asylum seeker to France, Harbi represents the old world mired by imperial-colonial hegemony yet teeming at the birthing promise of liberation: "In 1977, Djibouti was stepping down from the high solitude of being the last colonial stronghold. My country was brought into the world in its flag (blue, green, white, and red star), and I was in my prime, hardly thirty" (Waberi 7). Harbi's monologues offer a somber acknowledgment of Djibouti as a neocolonial potentate. His Western education and returnee status (a '*been-to*' educated in France) makes him, according to Fanon, a native intellectual (*Wretched* 209). The educated native, trapped between two worlds, defends their national culture, and "takes up arms to defend [the] nation's legitimacy," for "the nativeintellectual who decides to give battle to colonial lies fights on the field of the whole continent" (211). For Fanon, political power is substantive when coupled with a call-for-arms on the battlefields of liberatory justice that profoundly corrects the condemnation of colonial rule (211). Harbi's exhaustion with East Africa is obvious, and while his determinate experience counters Bashir's, it is the young ex-soldier who sublimates the failures of the region's ideological and cultural decolonization. Bashir chronicles the psycho-existential woes of the continent's many crises—civil discontent, famine, poverty,Western aid, and foreign military bases—to starkly remind us of the situated lives of Djiboutis. For it is Bashir who aptly chides, "there was war back home, the war kind of over now cause the Big Foreigner they say, better stop that war right away or no foreign aid" (Waberi 10). In so doing, his vivid animation about corruption disrupts Harbi's nationalist stance, despite the absence of Harbi's monologues from the novel's body.

Bashir's imperative liberty to spin off, without any categorical structure, the empire's never-ending presence makes the reader aware of the extensive chasm—physically and psychically—between the two characters. At the holding cell, the lack of interaction between the two represents the chasm present in the postcolony—liberatory praxis versus its subsequent fall—to come full circle. By writing monologues, Waberi builds on this structural disunity/unity between the reader and the speaking subjects. For example, Waberi complicates the role of the "*modern griot*," varying between Awaleh (pre-modern ancestor), Abdo-Julien (New Age), Alice (foreigner), Bashir (post-modern), and Harbi (modern). Indeed, *Transit* can be situated as Waberi's "griotic project"(Bouchard 50).19 The "*modern griot*," the storyteller (the oral

traditionalist Awaleh), is no longer a "premodern ancestor," but "the harbinger of a new culture of knowledge and action yet to be planted and harvested" (*Dialectical* 204). In *Transit*, the reality of a post-war society obliterates any reconciliation to a national identity and as such, the modern/national subject (Harbi) is questionable. Without disqualifying the national subject, Waberi invites the hybridized, cosmopolitan griot (Abdo-Julien) equally as he invites the foul-mouthed ignoramus—the fool (Bashir)—who speaks of irreconcilable truth, intimating a bitter, yet honest account of the colonial condition in present-day East Africa! Given Bashir's extraordinary virtue lies in his ability to speak the truth of his condition, is he the preferred griot rather than Harbi, Abdo-Julien, Alice, Awaleh? Sekyi-Otu explains: "like the Gramscian archetype, the modern griot is for Fanon the 'incarnated voice' of popular national requirements than the civil servant of the ruling class" (204). This assertion argues the griot shepherds the nation in a way "radically free from the ancestral complicity of the [premodern] griot's craft and epic knowledge in 'systems of 'power and domination'" (204). One clue to help us is the veritable containment of Harbi's narratives in the prologue and epilogue: powerful yet still contained. While Harbi admonishes Djibouti's bouts of violent unrest, and is compellingly Fanonian in necessitating Africa's future, he is the past. To put this another way, while Harbi recognizes justice and truth as politico-ethical imperatives, he must impart to the new subject: Bashir. Either way, Waberi evokes three deceased tritagonists—Alice, Abdo-Julien, and Awaleh—to lay out the historical context of the region's shifts and changes. Their monologues, written in a stream-of-consciousness mode, provide an excess of real and metaphysical borders. Written almost as spectral appendages between the human and non-human worlds, their stories connect the existential realities of a war-torn society. Perhaps or not,Waberi complicates Jacques Derrida's spectral of the ghost in the postcolonial world. Rather than adhering to 'living with the ghosts' as per Derrida, their phantom presence mark their deaths as part of Africa's legacy of violence—as victims of war and crime (Alice and Abdo-Julien), and of assassination (Awaleh). Since their ghostly existence cannot be analyzed as empty abstractions, their presence indicts Djibouti's perpetual calamities. As

19 Writing on Sembene Ousmane's oeuvre, Bouchard claims the iconoclastic filmmaker and writer engages with the griot as a "self-reflexive commentary on his own role as an artist in contemporary society" (50). While Waberi's work also engages with, quite consistently, the griot, the griot's power is questioned. That is, African literature has long centralized the power of the singular, powerful griot, who is political. Rather, Waberi diversifies this role to imply its former fixation on a singular character can no longer explain our contemporary world. In *Transit*, there are multiple griots, multiple roles, multiple goals. While Bouchard argues that Sembene advanced the "new griot" as a political one more acutely through film and word, Waberi's "new griot" is the unenlightened and the uneducated, but still has the capacity to fight for autonomy by questioning the uneven relations of power.

an ephemeral being, Abdo-Julien's magic lies in his evocation of the dialectical as critical engagement ("every man bears witness for humanity") while his mother criticizes colonial partition ("who cut up the land of the Son of Samaale") (Waberi 38; 49).20

The novel begins with Bashir's declarative, "I'm in Paris, *warya*—pretty good, huh?" (Waberi 3; emphasis original).21 Compulsively, yet comically, Bashir admits, "Ok, it's not really Paris yet but Roissy. That the name of the airoport. This airoport got two names, Roissy and Charles de Gaulle" (3). Bashir's initial outburst outlines the spatial difference between the border and the city—the airport as an international zone of transit, and Paris, as the imperial capital of French power and contemporary reverence. Juxtaposing Roissy against Djibouti's Ambouli, with its one name, Bashir offers a spatial description of the airport as "tinier" (3). Arriving on a Boeing 747, Bashir speaks like a bandit who is "discovering travel," falsely claiming he was "scotched-taped-in the last row … where the cops tie the deportees up tight when the plane goes back to Africa" (3).  Main thing, don't show you speak French.  As Treacy quips Bashir "is the exemplary par excellence of the newly globalized subject," he is also a keen observer (66). He concedes an African migrant is observed differently: "OK I don't say anything cause Roissy's danger, *they might say Africans, pains in the ass*" (Waberi 4; emphasis added). Despite France's anti-immigration policies— "Roissy's danger"—Bashir is happy to be there. His hackneyed, riddled vocabulary, full of ironies and macabre humor, presents *Transit* as a novel that refuses to be easily defined, assimilated, and receded into the background. Bashir's pace is quick, taciturn, and only comprehensible as a spoken language. Through his gusto, vulgar speech, Bashir is intent on making history, and this "act of self-fashioning," his street credo, challenges the European gaze (Treacy 68).

Starkly different is Harbi's narrative. It begins with his itinerary, and with contempt for Air France, France's contemporary sins are heightened. Despite Harbi's previous travels to Roissy, it is now different: it is a "new type of border—one that is mobile, portable or omnipresent," where the migrant is regulated by "an exercise of disciplinary power" (*Discipline* 198). At Roissy, Harbi observes "the boarding time for the Africans being deported 'of their own free will.' A dozen or so scheduled to be transported the usual way; three male individuals will be locked up in the cramped

20 Sab and Samaale are the founding lineages of the Somali culture. As such, there are several major tribes, clans, sub-clans, and families that make the extensive and complex genealogy of the Somali people. Waberi's mention of the "Samaale" is because the Djibouti people are descendants of the *Dir*, which makes them the cousins of the descendants of the *Ishaq* (Northern Somalia), whom both are from the Irir, then from the Samaale.

21 Warya means guy or man in Somali.

space of the restrooms, piled in and immediately incarcerated quick as two whiffs of a cigarette"(Waberi 5;*Necro* 101).Escorted by PAF agents(*Policedel'Air et desFrontieres*), the (African) refugee undergoes a processional removal: "each time, the unfortunate deportee tries squealing like a tortured whale just to stir the consciousness of the ordinary passenger, usually a tourist" (Waberi 6). The deportee's "extreme state of agitation" is juxtaposed by the impotence of any sympathetic passenger and an irate pilot malformed by the exasperating cry of the African (6). The intensity of his accursed fate, this Congolese shopkeeper, Harbi observes, defines him as the "savage of the colonial world"—the visible link between modernity and terror often found "in the political practises of the ancien régime" (*Necro* 72). A spectacle, the deportee exists between the state and the people and is condemned through various interdictive tactics at the border. Resisting arduously, the "troublemaker" is taken off the plane and returned to the holding cell, "the retention center in the waiting zone of the airport" (Waberi 6). Like the mark of the beast, the detention of the African deportee continues to incarcerate him. Harbi describes this deportee's fate as "luckier than the ones who die of dehydration in the Arizona desert or freeze to death inside the carriage of some cargo plane"(6). As Mbembe exclaims, "Where are the most deadly migrant routes? It is Europe!Who claims the largest number of skeletons and the largest marine cemetery in this century? Again, it is Europe!," the border is the ultimate confrontation that provokes fear and enforces death, not the (im)migrant (*Necro* 101).

Interestingly, Bashir's praise of Roissy airport, with him being "in front of the paradise of Whites" is countered by Harbi's memory and present disgust: "lost in the bowels of Roissy airport" (Waberi 9; 6). Bashir's utterances, hardly reflective and mostly projecting, are clear: "I'm talking all alone to buck myself up, I look overhere or overthere and I can't see nothing…gotta keep cool, act like professional military. I stare everywhere and name everything I see in the rush and crush of voices an lives" (9). Young, immature, and exhibiting a false consciousness, Bashir's rapaciousness weaves an intricate web of survival and subsistence. His adaptive skills serve him well at Roissy, as following Moussa, his inconspicuous expert guide, allows him to navigate the "poured-concrete labyrinth of late-'60s brutalism" many must cross before entering the French territory (Treacy 64). Bashir always stirs trouble, always the antithesis: His mischievous slights such as introducing himself as 'Bashir Binladen' is a heightened exemplar of inversion. Treacy argues that Bashir "authors a double counter-narrative" where his infamous nickname undermines Western hegemony in an increasingly securitized post-9/11 site such as the airport (68). Equally bright yet duplicitous, Bashir never utters his nickname to the French officials.  His big head with fine-fine beard, most expensive in the world. Worth five million dollar" (Waberi 23, emphasis original). Admonishing himself on the one hand, "it's too-too much, right?" yet a few minutes

later declaring, "I am mini-Binladen, like Madonna dolls, Michael Jackson dolls," Bashir is the apt consumer of Western capitalism, and his contradictory impulses counter his adherence to Islamic fundamentalism (23). Bashir's comparison to Bin Laden offers the reader a set of competing signs, where his symbiotic relationship to the world's notorious killer becomes a national symbol of identity and pride. Like Bin Laden, he is "wicked and pitiless. I suicided men, enemy Wadag*s* and other men not enemies. I trashed houses, I drilled girls, I pirated shopkeepers. I pooped in the mosque, but don't shout that from rooftops cause I was pickled. I done it all" (23).22 Yet unlike Bin Laden, his warrior ethos is not funded by "rich fat-cat Saudis," whom along with Bin Laden's family abandoned him, "afraid to catch big American revenge" (23). Bashir's bombastic exhibition of Osama Bin Laden's notoriety is to satirically tease out an irreconcilability between his childish venality and the acerbic reality of 9/11 for the global community. Indeed, Bashir mocks America's ignorance of Bin Laden's backstory: it's not "Gaudy Arabia," because "before he got rich an smart he was living out in the sticks in Yemen" (37). Similarly, Abdo-Julien's warning also activates the haunting danger of the "inevitable victory of the Great Bearded One," with school posters commemorating "Long Live Osama," as well as protests, and the "aggressive sympathy in strategic points in the capital," the Greater Horn is broadcasted as a supposed hiding spot—"have located him in the nakedness of nearby Somalia"—much to the chagrin of the unbelieving peasant (108).

As French speaking subjects, Harbi and Bashir are distinctly the Other, or as Mbembe informs us, part of the "indistinct mass" at Roissy's *zone d'attente* (to paraphrase Fanon, the relationship between the settler and the native is always a 'mass relationship') (*Out* 104; *Wretched* 53). The novel's inception implies a treacherous history of anti-immigration in France, and as Harbi and Bashir become indelibly linked, the desire to acquire citizenship in a post-Cold War era trigger "the residual nerves" of a post-September 11 context in Western Europe (Roman 73). In her article, Leslie Roman reflects on the facile discussions of global citizenship, insisting the dominant rhetoric of the "official we" is based on the interests of the "original citizens" of the West (73). With 9/11 as the "defining catastrophe" of the US and other terrorist attacks in Europe have stirred anxieties and insecurities, Harbi's advocacy for the (im)migrant Other is a juxtaposition (74). By defending the immigrant, not only is Harbi disturbed that the airport is a special zone that excises the influx of the Other, for the nation-state's capacity for "refoulement," risk of return for the refugee is always greater, but the disavowal of the immigrant's history:: "I have an old debt to settle with France; people think migrants arrive naked in a new land at the end of their odyssey; yet migrants are loaded with their personal stories and heavier still with what is called collective history" (Roman 5; Waberi 6). Part of this "collective history" is Harbi's portraiture as a living vestige of post-independent East Africa.

22 Wadags means male religious leaders.

As Waberi connects Djibouti's colonial legacy to the migrant's plight, Harbi's "final" exilic journey has shattered him, and all memories of Djibouti devastate him. In a flashback to his childhood, he recalls passing a military patrol and asking, "Who are those people? (Waberi 7). His aunt replies, "'the French, our colonizers,'" and as he questions their validity, he is silenced, "because they're stronger than we are" (7).

As a French colony, Djibouti is at Roissy's door. By withstanding colonial domination, *Transit* augments the devastating effects of civil war in post-colonial societies are rooted in a myriad of differing cleavages. This complexity—the duality between internal and external factors—has sequestered Africa into a media-informed frenzy of political corruption and economic subsistence. The result is the mass exodus of its inhabitants: "that shrinking land of ours is crisscrossed with people in perpetual motion," says Harbi, sympathetic of the African's plight (6). Forcibly removed from the colony to the mothercolony, the (im)migrant displays the psychic wounds of a brutal, violent (recent) past that suspends any reconciliation towards nationhood. For instance, Harbi is troubled by the extensity of African migration, like the African football players who shamelessly seek refuge elsewhere after an event. Ashamed to receive political asylum in France, his *return*, produces his *death desire*: "I've accepted the idea that I am going to die like everyone else and I'm not about to change my mind" (7). By reconciling his "morbid, incongruous ideas," "snickering little voice," and "dislocated body," Harbi contends this process produces the new immigrant: "In short, get used to my new identity" (7). Like the colonized, the immigrant is "absolutely fixed in this space," separated from others and "compelled to renounce the 'self '" (*Dialectical* 83). In Harbi's case, migration to the metropolis is a process of re-colonization helped by OFPRA,23 "the open sesame for any aspiring candidate for exile" (Waberi 7). Harbi's exile offers the airport as a conflicting context, thereby enforcing the dismemberment of belonging and memory: "it's like the silence of the desert here; the hours go by in neutral. Nothing to do except think, rehash the past, obsess over it endlessly" (7). Equally, Bashir's new awareness of the airport is edged as a space of difference, further tabling his prideful assertions: "I'm not afraid of nothing, not even foreigners(oh no! am I offmy rocker or what? the foreigners, that's us now, the natives here, its them)" (9).

Signifying Djibouti's independence, Bashir's birthdate is a post-colonial crisis: "I was born yesterday. …I mean I was not born too long ago, even for this little chick of a country…we're the same age" (9). Correspondingly, in 1977, Harbi was thirty—"I was young, handsome, and strong"—an eager nationalist, a cosmopolitan *évolué*, and faithfully, the son of Africa's future (7). If Bashir is a symbol of the new regime, a "neocolonized subject," then Harbi's return from France at the exact moment of flag independence enacts a conditional *ethos* of liberation in Djibouti (Treacy 66). Waberi's hesitance—his crisis of difference—is because Djibouti's path to national

23 OFPRA : Office de Protection des Refugies et Apatrides. See Waberi, page 7.

consciousness exacerbates the limits of liberatory struggle.A late bloomer, "colonialism's exit," so to speak, in Djibouti never fully matriculated with the rest of Africa's national fervour (66). In other words, the birthing of a 'true' national consciousness in Djibouti has been a contrived process.The armed struggle by FLCS against French targets,24 the impossibility of a successful third referendum, and French colonial power at its tethering ends by the 70s has led to the young nation's somewhat piecemeal process—rather than a complete revolutionary overthrow—further securing France's imperial power forever. France never left and given the proximate hotbeds of the Middle East and Greater Horn region, the two permanent bases—the French Foreign Legion and US's Camp Lemonnier—and at least eight other military bases and several operative agencies, adumbrates Djibouti's compliance (and its continual allegiance) with the "official machinations" of the global North (66). So much so, Waberi situates this existential reality in Bashir's prologue to show France's imperial stronghold.The readerismade aware of the colonizer's grasp,as Bashir notices a soldier's return from Djibouti when picking up his baggage at Roissy: "My bag blocked between two boxes of French military, label it says: 'AD 188,' I know what that is, it Air Detachment 188, navigation base right next to airoport in Ambouli as a matter of fact" (Waberi 3–4). This 'matter of fact' is a presage to the novel's crisis with Roissy, enacting a spatial dynamic between France'simperiality and Djibouti's postcoloniality. Although not mentioned in the novel, the US base is also situated near Ambouli, heightening its spatial proximity as the product of post-independence failure—one demonstrative of Djibouti's gradual indeterminacy.25