The Migrant

The migrant is that human being suspended between two worlds. He converses with another migrant, argues with the son of the land, speaks with himself in a silent solitude. In every dialogue, he confronts truth and escape at once.

I always carry the tax paper with me, and when one of them opens his mouth to cast doubt on me, I show him the paper, saying: “Here it is, the tax paper. I have taken no benefits; it is you who takes from my money.”

Rushdi Abaza. No one used to speak to me, and when the dog came, everyone began to speak to me. I walk with Rushdi Abaza. Even the school would not grant me leave — not for illness, not even for my sour mood; but when the dog came, I began taking leaves in his name, for his illness, for his mood. The dog takes a leave, and I with him.

Among his daily habits: browsing the news… without being part of it. Pornography… an escape from a reality that grants him no intimacy. Isolation… even in the crush of the great cities.

The migrant does not converse with humans alone; he converses with that phantasmal thing, that spectre he calls fear. Does he speak to it? Or is it merely an inner voice that accompanies him without an answer? The whole narrative is a moment before death. It resembles the moment of drowning, which the migrant knows better than anything else.

His good fortune is in truth a postponed death. In the moment he flees death, he finds himself in its embrace, as though life were mocking him. The moment of his father's death… when you clutch the man's cloak in the mosque and wept like a lost child.

You do not lie, not because you are truthful, but because you do not know how to lie. Lying is a rare gift, and you are not among the rare. To be an open book means to be a weak book. The binding protects the book, whereas the open pages are consumed quickly. Migration knows you better than you know yourself. It governs your fate. The labour office grants you your livelihood. Health insurance decides when you will live and when you will die.

The migrant is not a number in a factory. Not a part of an economic machine. Not another shade among the shades of modern slavery. Not a follower of anyone… not of his mother, not of his father, not even of his friend who drowned before him. He is more complex than that. He is a human being, in all that the word means. He resembles you, Mister White, but no one resembles you in your hideousness. Do you know yourself? Or do you speak in order to convince yourself of your existence?

Migration is the flaying of a person from his surroundings and his sowing in a strange land. It is one of the great stations of death. Migration is an escape; even writing about it is a migration, a drowning in thoughts that do not know where they are taking you. The migrant sees the scenes and projects them onto his own reality. A tangled composite between memories and reality, between the past and the present. Memories do not die, and reality is not seen clearly. And so “The Migrant” is born. It is the moment in which illusion mingles with truth, and madness with reason.

Fear of the future is the first engine of the stubborn migrant. He is the far-reaching in his thinking, the illogical in his feeling, the stretched-out in his religion. The loss of the past is the loss of the human being. As the Chinese proverb says: “He who had no past has no future.” And so, at a certain point… he married.

This book was written in a mad way. The writer does not know why he wrote it, nor why he did not write it. The introduction is the conclusion, and the conclusion is the beginning. No beginning, no end, no fixed direction. Is it a book of wisdom? Or a poetic book? Or a mocking one? Or something outside classification? No one knows. Even the writer himself does not know. All he knows is that he loves to see black ink on white paper, and in the eyes of readers.