This child’s first trip is a refugee’s trip. He does not know it. The first years of his life are marked by this tear. The shock wave of the war is centrifugal, it produces a violent diaspora. At the landing, the bodies bear the marks of the crossing. Sometimes, they don’t survive. Those who welcome or reject, see, can see – and yet find it hard to imagine. Whoever accepts or rejects does first of all the count, the appeal: the number comes before the single stories. The single and specific reasons, fears, despair. The word ‘refugee’ is not an easy word, although the habit of hearing it makes it sound like one. So writes Abdulrazak Gurnah, the latest Nobel Prize for literature, giving a voice to a man who ‘seeks asylum’.
Leaving what we know and arriving in strange places, dragging small bundled luggage and hiding secret and repressed ambitions. For some, like for me, it was the first flight….
The same is true for the child of photography. Someone, with an expressionless face, will ask for a passport. “Refugee, I said pointing to my chest. Asylum.” Could the geographical proximity of this war help us to understand the other side of every war, even the most remote one? I do not know. But in the word refugee there is the most challenging human stake of this century.