Migration, homelessness and internalised displacement

Abstract

Discourses of migration tend to be decontextualised from the personal and from the lived experience of displaced peoples. Splitting migrant bodies from land, history and their socio-political realities contributes to the dehumanisation of those who have had to make a home outside borders set by colonialism, whiteness and associated ethno-nationalist violence – often because of the sequelae of colonialism, whiteness and associated ethno-nationalist violence. Engaging with the embodied experience of migrants and situating it within intergenerational contexts of homelessness and displacement is the strategy adopted here to give a name to the nameless and to theorise that which is all too often rendered meaningless, insignificant and, therefore, invisible. In this article, through an auto-ethnographic engagement with our roots in the “heart of Africa” – a part of the world so heavily tainted with blood, mutilation and imperial necropolitics – we reflect on the journey to navigating the hostility, territoriality and dislocation caused by migration. We are two Black African women with complicated and fragmented histories with the continent of Africa. We ask the reader to follow our journeys and that of ‘Others’ as we reflect on the psychological and ontological consequences of border violence and necropolitics. We consider what living at the border of home entails and the various ways of being and thinking we have employed to resist internalised displacement.