Just stay put and keep quiet In hindsight, the permanent state of the camps had always been impermanence; they were momentary and ephemeral, much like the dust that drove people westwards in the first place. — Joseph Heathcott. ‘Dustbowl Designs’ (26:DIRT)
1. From Roman military encampments to contemporary refugee settlements in South Sudan, all camps share the same passion for order. Notice I don’t mention the inhabitants; it’s the camps that want the clean lines and right angles that push us – strangers huddled together – into community. I remember going to camp as a child. We would set up our tent (well, my parents would set it up), glance with suspicion at our neighbours (the same brand of tent, yes, but where were they from?), and wonder at a world that brings together hundreds of strangers, assembled in a field, in identical tents. My suspicion soon faded amidst the camp activities – making banners, sing-alongs around the campfire, treasure hunts in the forest – and the intense forms of belonging that inevitably accompany the founding of a new community, no matter how temporary. I felt the same sentiment that infuses every bad film about American summer camp: time at camp was a suspension of the everyday world, a magic moment to be held up, bright against a dreary existence. The stronger and more coercive the rules and activities governing the camp, the closer I felt to the people around me. Community here was not based on a shared sense of life – lived histories entangled together – but on a contingent coming together in a field, a contingency that was occluded by the intensity of our need to belong together, and mark this strange field as our own. People held up by banners. If anyone expressed doubt about the magical time we were sharing (rain, cold, tents, mud), they would only have to remember that we were in it together, and that those unlucky souls not fated to go to camp were irrevocably sundered from us. All camps are based on exclusion. Impossible to imagine then that I would spend so much of my life in camps, around camps, thinking about camps. Even more impossible: to realize – at seven years old, in 1989 – that in twenty years there would be six million people in UNHCR camps; that considered globally, there would be twelve million people in a thousand refugee camps, and that the temporary arrangements of the camp have become a permanent fate for millions. 2. Camps exist in the space between things; they are the orderly spaces that hold together the chaos caused by people passing through worlds. During initiation, the youth of the Nuer, a Nilotic people resident in what is now Southern Sudan, used to be secluded from society – the passage from boy to man was a dangerous time of uncertainty, to be spent in camps, away from parents and family. In Purity and Exile, Liisa Malkki’s study of Burundian refugees at a Tanzanian camp, she sketches out a world in which the Hutu who fled Burundi were treated like children without history by the UNHCR; neither Tanzanian nor Burundian, the refugees remained outside national categories, and in so being, threatened them. The UNHCR attempted to create an ideology of the camp, replete with UNHCR banners and parade-ground marches. 3. I can remember the day I went back to camp. 2 March 2011. Militias were attacking army positions just ten kilometres north of where I was staying, and the bodies were piling up in a tent outside my door. That night, I needed a drink, and the only place one could get alcohol was in the United Nations camp. On my way there, I passed thousands of people fleeing south. Once inside, surrounded by containers arranged in a grid system, I sat, incredulous, as five UN employees, seemingly oblivious as to what was occurring just outside, exchanged jokes about ‘Polish sausage’ and planned nights out at the ‘Brazilian Bar’. During the earlier attacks in January, one particularly flippant nurse told me, she had not known anything until she received a call from her mother in New Zealand, who was concerned by what was happening, ‘and so’, she said, ‘I turned on the television, and watched with my mum’. The UN camp in Abyei, a contested area between Sudan and South Sudan, was heavily walled, with watchtowers manned by Zambian peacekeepers every two hundred metres or so. Inside, rigid lines of containers were aligned along concrete paths. UN employees would jog along the camp’s perimeter in the early evening, when the dry-season heat became bearable. There was volleyball and barbeques; I don’t think I would have been surprised if the UN announced they were to have treasure hunts in the forest, if it were not for the fact that their staff almost never left the base. With its mixture of nationalities, I sometimes think it is a miracle that the UN functions at all (to the extremely limited extent that it does, indeed, function). Part of its ability to create an identity for itself, like all camp civilizations, relies on its separation from the
7
look at the resulting sketchbook with its series of landscapes, I noticed that independent of their variation, they all had that urgent stroke necessary to
get on paper what quickly would be getting out of sight. It made me think, as the hard urban inhabitant I am, that the condition of drawing quickly these landscapes was
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator