My sensation of bureaucratic grief

I called it mine, but it is shared by many—those who have to wait for months to renew their stay permits, or those migrants who are living without knowing if they’ll ever get to meet their loved ones again

I broke down the instant the person at the post office gave me the slip containing the date when I could go to the police station to submit all the data required to have my stay permit renewed. It will be in April next year. My sentence had been delivered. Eight months in limbo. The distance between my body and its homes back home seemed suddenly immeasurable. I felt in danger of being forgotten by all my loved ones, not out of choice, but because that is how it is when you do not confront the materiality of someone’s existence regularly. There is this threat of inevitably vanishing from their consciousness. I was not alone in my quandary. My Pakistani friend was also given a date eight months from now. This is simply how it is when you are an immigrant in Italy. The choice is simple, the Italian State believes, if you miss home so badly, go back. If you want to live here, you must play this waiting game while respecting the opaqueness of borders. Cross them at your peril. 

That a person can be illegal is one of the worst outcomes of nation-state ordering systems. You live the contradiction of being in a globalised world in which you are denied mobility and cannot participate, because your passport is not the right colour. 

The unfairness of the procedure provoked my meltdown. I was able to snap out of it when I realised that I was privileged enough to be happy. I couldn’t imagine what life would have been like for me if I was condemned to continue living here without the luxury of domestic bliss. There are many South Asian women, who, like me, came here to join their spouses, only to be subject to various forms of abuse; many whose illiteracy prevents them from taking any form of action. I was in a better space, I told myself. But the sting of this form of bureaucratic violence doesn’t seem to go away. I am still processing what it means for me in terms of how I earn my livelihood, and what it means for our child, who cannot access our family back home because they’re unable to get appointment dates to submit their visa application in order to visit us. 

My parents told me not to think about it, which is not in keeping with my therapist’s advice about allowing my feelings to pass through me. I am still undergoing a range of emotions, from anger to heartbreak to envy. I am caught in a quagmire. I can and cannot go back home. I can, legally, only take a direct flight back home. Except our child doesn’t have his passport yet (we got a date for December). Him and I being separated is not an option for me. Instead of not thinking about it, I try to hone into my emotions in order to understand better the plights of those who are probably living more worst-case scenarios than me, not with the motive of feeling better about my situation, but so I can finally express a solidarity that comes from lived empathy. 

Yesterday I tried to communicate with the cleaning lady at the amazing, sprawling institute I’m currently at in Innsbruck, for my last teaching assignment outside Italy. I asked her, in German, if she could come back a little later as our child was asleep. She didn’t have the facial expressions of someone who had understood me. I realised later she was from Ukraine. I saw her with her child. She, like so many other Ukrainian women, are refugees in Europe, because of the ongoing war, most of them partner-less, because their men stayed back to fight Putin. I thought about what it might be like to live in the uncertainty of not knowing whether you will ever see your loved ones again or return to the world you knew because it has been bombed out.

My students and I spent our class in the middle of a forest. I introduced them to Audre Lorde’s text on the uses of poetry and then broke them into two groups. Their assignment was to agree upon 10 sentences from the text that they collectively loved, and to find a way to utter them aloud as a group. The result was beautiful and moving—transforming the energy field we were in. I then decided to summon the spirit of Lorde herself, so found a recording on YouTube in which she reads her poem, A Litany for Survival. I felt each word resound within my body, throbbing through my veins, assuring me I was not alone in my sensation of bureaucratic grief; that my tired resilience would still sustain and nourish me while I stood on the shoreline between the past, present, and future. “We were never meant to survive,” is the line that concludes the poem. Each time I want to say, “Amen, Lorde, Amen.”

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx

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