Por

Nasceu em Abadan, no Iran, e foi criado na Inglaterra e nos Estados Unidos. Estudou na Boston, Massachusettes. Ele escreve contos, ensaios, e artigos sobre a política do oriente médio. Atualmente, Reza Fiyouzat vive no Japão, e leciona na Nihon University

Versão em português:

Abstratos Nomádicos

Nomadic Abstracts

Although most of humanity is localized, the conditions of the 'global nomads' (migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, international seasonal workers, gypsies, sex slaves, etc.) actually provide a better view into the general state of humanity. As for the terminology, I am basically resisting the use of the term 'migrant' for this large group, which goes beyond migrants, anyway. This term is so loaded with stereotypes and abstractions of people we 'see' in five, ten, twenty-second sound-bytes on the news, that as soon as the term is used, most brains switch to the ready-made stereotype, stop hearing the rest of the argument, and miss the point.

Luca Dall'Oglio, Permanent Observer to the United Nations, in his statement to United Nations General Assembly, 3rd Committee: Questions relating to Refugees, Returnees and Displaced Persons and Humanitarian Question (New York, November 3, 2003), stated, “In today's world, international migration has achieved a degree of prominence on the international agenda never felt before. It is not only because there are 175 million international migrants, but because all indicators point to migration as a continuing and growing structural component of contemporary socio-economic development, whose benefit can reach out to origin and destination countries.”

This figure of 175 million humans represents roughly 3% of humanity. The figure includes highly skilled workers, estimated at around 1 million, all the way to the bottom of the rungs filled with manual foreign workers of all skills, estimated at around 27 million people. The figure also includes people being trafficked across international borders, an estimated 2 million annually. What this figure does not include are the illegal immigrants. Estimated at around 2 to 4 million people annually. Also of note is that, of these migrants, in terms of absolute numbers (not percentages of total local populations) the biggest concentration (56.1 million) is located in Europe, the second highest (49.7 million) in Asia, and the third largest (40.8 million) in North America.

To the above figure we must add another. In its annual report for the year 1997, titled, The State of the World’s Refugees, 1997: A Humanitarian Agenda, the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) stated, “In total, some 50 million people around the world might legitimately be described as victims of forced displacement.” This number can safely be taken as standard to this day. And today, it would be a very conservative estimate. These include the international refugees, as well as people ‘displaced internally’, meaning they are refugees in their own countries.

To this mass of humanity being thrust about the globe annually in search of jobs, safety, food, shelter, or a bit of warmth and comfort humanity still can afford to offer, we must add the massive human displacements due to modernity’s quests throughout the centuries in civil wars, wars between nations, and conquests in the name of Civilization Building, namely, Colonization. And this last one is by no means a bad nightmare from modernity’s shameful past, one that has been rectified and atoned for. Far from it; this colonial ‘tendency’ is still alive and kicking well. Witness the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and, the longest running current colonial project, the continued colonization of Palestinian land after more than 37 years, and the brutal suffocation of the Palestinians at the hands of a colonizing and openly racist state.

So, it takes little theoretical insight to say that the modern nomad is moved around the globe by forces far more complex than those moving the traditional nomads. These forces are man-made, even in some instances where natural phenomena such as floods or mudslides have caused the displacement of large communities in places where, say, over-logging has been consistently practiced. So, what forces are those, then, that move our modern nomads? Forces of the market’s invisible hands are the more ‘innocent’ of them. Take the ‘rate of profit’: its defense and protection by any means necessary requires that capital take flight at the first sign of diminishing returns. Then there are the less innocent forces of the political machinations of the markets. And finally, in the service of expanding our dear market, the ever-needed wars: of colonization to plunder resources; of national-state expansions, nationalistic/racial purges, annexations; of inter-imperialist wars over colonial ‘acquisitions’; and of course, of civil wars. And let’s not forget the covert interventions in the life of other nations, something which the sedentary citizens of the First World nations are on average more comfortable with than are the citizens of the Third World.

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The Qashqai tribes of Iran are a traditional nomadic people. As herders, they move from one territory to another, depending on the seasons as well as the availability of grazing land, mostly in the southern regions in and around the province of Fars. In the developmental models that take western industrialized states as their reference, the Qashqai people are a traditionalist people, meaning pre-modern; modernity, meaning capitalism, and its onset in clear view, say, by 1500s.

Were we to compare what I’ve termed the ‘modern nomads’ to the traditional nomads, the latter could easily be considered the happier of the two. Happier, obviously since, in spite of the constant physical movement, they have peace and security of mind: peace of mind from the assurance that tomorrow will be just as filled with fruitful effort and labor as is today. And happy also in the sense meant by the Slovenian writer and intellectual, Slavoj Zizek: happy in that they have ‘tempered their desires.’ That is: desires to go beyond their life-experience are put on a leash, and anybody who’s seen them in person will not mistake the smiles on their rose-cheeked faces as forced or fake, the way a McDonald’s counter person is trained to fake it.

This is not to say that nomadic tribes are fundamentally free from contradictions or incapable of violence; we need only remember the Mongolian invasions, or tribal wars throughout the ages. But, it is to say that violence is far less structurally necessary among the traditional nomads, especially as they are situated in and surrounded by modernity today.

A Western middle class reader may think, “Surely the traditional nomads must be miserable and must yearn for something more. They must have yearnings!” And some do in fact. When attending a university in Lafayette, Louisiana, in the early 1980s, I knew a couple from Iran who were actually from the Qashqai tribes. Their parents still lived the traditional nomadic life. Both of the couple, however, were studying engineering sciences, so chances are that their return trips back home would be for visits only. To find the employment for which they were getting an education, they would have to find it in some urban, industrial (i.e. sedentary) setting, in whichever country they finally settled.

But, who says the traditional nomad’s yearnings are limited to wanting to ‘break free’ from the ‘shackles’ and ‘drudgery’ of being a herdsman or woman? Their striving may just as well be for a better way of herding, or for better tools to improve the conditions of their chosen way of life. Or for less arbitrary districting of the lands they traverse or for less harassment by the national armies and paid thugs grabbing their grazing lands on behalf of some corporation or government agency. Such nomadic peoples have the longest running record of successful, sustained, and sustainable existence for thousands of years. Clearly they have something going for them.

In this light, we can safely say that, on average, the traditional nomad is much happier than the modern nomad. Then, we can just as safely side with a Qashqai nomad in the outskirts of Shiraz, who, when faced with his sedentary cousin, the super-stressed tradesman from Bazaar-e Vakil (Shiraz’s biggest and oldest market, adjacent to its biggest mosque, Shah-cheraqh), boastfully declares his own nomadic method of sustenance far superior, far freer, and inducing far fewer ulcers. The sedentary cousin cannot but nod in agreement and reflect sadly on the social relations of domination that arbitrarily contain and suffocate his whole life, feeding his purely economic and even private acts through the administrative machine of the modern state as it has (or not) developed in Iran.

So, between these two, i.e. between the traditional nomads  and the town/city dwellers, whose identity is more secure, more self-assured, and less riddled with contradictions? Or, is this a false question?

The liberating question cannot be one of choosing between capitalism in its different forms and adapting some pre-capitalist method in organizing modern life with all its complexities. Such was the dilemma for Pol Pot. The answer to our modern riddle cannot be that simplistic.

The modern nomad, by contrast, has a better objective position to discern the arbitrary nature of the given rules, of seeing through to the heart of the instability of the system, the very instability that his modern sedentary cousins may take for ‘the creative powers of capital’ and therefore the zenith of stability incarnate. The Iraqi man of about 40 years of age, who sits in some Iranian prison as a prisoner of war, some fifteen years after the war has ended, knows how arbitrary modern life is. At the age of eighteen, or perhaps earlier, at the peak of his health and creativity, brimming with potential, filled with dreams, he was drafted into army by some decree by a dictator, and was summarily sent to a war, over the ensuing of which he had zero input, and from which he had less to gain. While in this war, he did his best to survive, only to be taken a prisoner. To this man (at 40-something, his life’s prospects dwindled to a singular continuous road through one random destitution after another, never given a chance) can anybody say with a straight face that modern life is anything but a random, senseless, irrational series of events?

Most modern nomads lack the illusory senses of sustained happiness, at least for the duration of their journeys through different postings, different contracts, ‘jobs’, or conversely through the myriad refugee camps, prisons, or as they are being smuggled across international borders, or as they travel through dangerous terrain on foot with no support. The modern nomads form a global underclass; except, of course, for that highly paid professional part in its higher echelons, proving ironically that all social formations are riddled with class contradictions. As this modern nomad is forced about the globe by the miracle of all Modern miracles, i.e., by the global market and/or its half-brothers, modern international politics and wars, he or she sees clearly that borders are highly selective (hence, random, arbitrary), letting through mostly the money and the moneyed. The modern nomads see just as clearly that the First World moneyed people who come to visit with armies, rudely help themselves to their lands and resources with no shame at all, while preaching the sanctity of sovereignty for their own lands. The modern nomad is the first to point out the similarities between methods used by his own local dictator to rise to power (causing him to escape some possible persecution) and those used by George W. Bush in his rise to power in 2000.

It is a fact that most of humanity is still sedentary, and attached to (or, locked into) localities. This part of humanity thus constituting the ‘normal’, never the less is not free of the problems and contradictions of modern society. Each sedentary community faces its local problems: finding jobs and avoiding the homeless status, finding fulfilling jobs if possible, educating their kids, finding proper health care, securing a half-decent pension or trying to find out who stole it, facing crumbling infrastructure, facing violence in their communities or domiciles, dealing with congestion and the nowadays guaranteed air/water/soil/food pollution, dealing with lack of reliable, responsible or responsive officials, grappling with potential or actual poverty, hunger, unemployment, or conversely with effects of over-consumption, addiction and waste, and a whole series of malignancies that we are told are necessary, even therapeutic: necessary, because part and parcel of the road that paves the path to, and sustains, our beloved Modernity.

Whereas the majority of humanity has to struggle with local, particular, or specific conflicts and contradictions (even if these do have universal, structural causes), the modern nomadic minority struggles with and is trying to come to grips with the more universal symptoms of modernity and its contradictions. The modern nomad is therefore the indication of the price that this world system is not only willing to pay, but is happily sacrificing to the whims of the global market in increasing numbers. So, at the current stage in the development of our species, is not this modern nomadic minority a truer window to our identity and to our collective state than is its sedentary cousin?

Herein lies the relevant question of identity. What aspect of identity are we trying to address? Are we after some static definition, much like that which an anthropologist would construct of a people about to be subjugated (either textually or really)? In other words, do we consider identity a closed system of ideations that comes pre-packaged, forever the same, and its conflicts never internal, but in encounters with an ‘other’ that is equally a closed system, a pre-packaged set and forever the same? That mythical state of pure identity, if it ever existed at all, was shattered by the development of the world capitalist system, which has brought us the hybrid man and the end of purity. And for that we must thank capitalism.

Through a close look at the conditions that give rise to and constantly reproduce increasing numbers of modern nomads, we can shed light on the deeper causes of our universal problems. Modern nomads, their conditions and their struggles give fresh blood to the identity question that truly matters: What kind of a species are we going to be? Are we going to continue on our current (supposedly naturally occurring) fixation with a destructive path we have been set upon, and continue to be a species riddled with neuroses, psychoses, self-contradiction, and alienation, forever fighting against ourselves? Or, in striving to go beyond our present state, are we going to become a species that is happier, less desirous and envious, more content and more at peace?

Our species is not a happy species. Our sicknesses and the injuries we keep inflicting on ourselves are so numerous it gets tiring thinking about them. Sure, we do have happiness. And, yes, any real effort in striving to go beyond our present state will come with pain. But the problem with the happiness we have right now is that, like all things, it’s crammed with class conflict: the ruling classes monopolize most of the happiness, while the majority of the species waddles through the infinite supply of misery. So, the striving to go beyond would naturally find its proponents mostly among the dispossessed majority. 

We do have a choice. And the choice is still the same as it was when Marx put it bluntly as the one between socialism and barbarism. It is very clear which is the choice of the ruling classes. But the choice of the working classes is not very clear yet.