Making music in exile and fighting border violence

Abstract

This article has been written in collaboration with Beshwar Hassan, a Kurdish musician who spent a few months in the camp of Grande-Synthe, near Dunkirk (France). Music was highly important in the leadership role he played in the camp. It especially gave him the ability to entertain the community and draw the attention and sympathy of humanitarian workers and volunteers who supported his position. During his time in the camp, he “became” a musician through the recognition of both his musical skills and his leadership. This study analyzes how he constructed his online presence through his relationship with music, using Facebook both as a social medium and as a technical tool, that is, a space where music is “mediated” through the technical capabilities of the platform and used to share narratives of exile with an audience made up of Facebook friends. This research began while Beshwar Hassan and his family were living in the Grande-Synthe camp and ended 1 year later when they were granted asylum in the United Kingdom.

Keywords

border violence communication ethnography music social media

We use our hand to write about each other, so why not use our hand through music as a language, as a weapon, as a bridge, as a connection between each other?

(Beshwar Hassan, 11 March 2019)

Contemporary forced migration in Europe is characterized by a context of “border violence” which is highly political and institutional. This violence is often examined through the lens of physical abuses migrants have to endure during their journey before crossing Europe’s borders and can be estimated by the dramatic number of deaths at borders, especially those due to the deadly crossing of the Mediterranean sea.¹

This violence has a long history. As Abdelmalek Sayad (1991) showed, in the French context of immigration in the 1980s, different forms of violence have accompanied for a long time the everyday life of immigrants from the “South.” He explained how political exclusion and physical abuses are closely linked. This link comes with the incorporation of different borders in the immigrant’s body. More recently, this question of the violence inflicted on both the immigrant’s and migrant’s racialized body has been reinvestigated to show how these “border bodies” are submitted to different kinds of verbal, physical, and political abuses (Guénif-Souilamas, 2010). The border in this case is not only the frontier; it is also a fracture within society. Moreover, there is another transformation of contemporary borders which is characterized by the many spaces “in the border” where migrants in transit have to live (Agier, 2008, 2014, 2017).

In this context of forced migration, part of the violence is linked to the condition of being in exile in itself: the violence of the impossible return, the violence of being “apart” from the common world (Arendt, 2013). This violence is intensified for those who are marginalized from the European political, economic, and racial order. The second types of violence are those, more specific, that migrants face in places of transit (camps, various types of slums, detention centers) and in city neighborhoods, all marked by the militarization of their border. The Dublin Regulation leaves migrants in transit in Europe in a gray area, without any real legal existence and particularly vulnerable to violence (Jeandesboz and Pallister-Wilkins, 2014).

As Chowra Makaremi (2016) has argued, this violence is diverse, and the very characterization of violence as “political” is a political and legal issue. From an ethnographic perspective, we have chosen not to limit the meaning and forms of border violence, but instead to consider how it should be understood in respect of the experiences of those who cross borders in Europe in search of political asylum.

We have chosen to write this article by connecting our experiences of how music, in this context of border violence, can shape the experience of exile and can be used to make sense of the migration experience, while building an intimate and shareable memory. The first perspective, that of Beshwar Hassan, is one of a musician who crossed Europe from Kurdistan in Iraq looking for political asylum in the United Kingdom. His journey and the journey of his family lasted one and a half years. Beshwar and his family have now been granted asylum. The second one is the perspective of a researcher in social science and cultural practitioner. We met in La Linière camp in Grande-Synthe² in March 2016. Together we organized several musical sessions in the camp and outside, and we stayed in contact via Facebook after he had crossed the British border. From an ethnographic perspective, that is, reflexive and critical, we tried to elaborate a form of dialogue on the way. Beshwar, through his musical practice and the way he built narratives in which musical practices and musical moments were central, tried (usually successfully) to find spaces in which to communicate with different types of audiences about his experience and ordeal during his exile, and more specifically about border violence. The text was then written by Émilie Da Lage and reviewed by Beshwar Hassan.

This article does not try to explore private feelings and psychological states as such. Instead, we have tried to analyze several communicational situations in which music, narratives, and discourses built on music were performed live or were using communication technologies. We will focus on concerts in La Linière camp in Grande-Synthe and in Lille, a radio broadcast on a local radio station, Beshwar’s activity on Facebook from March 2016 until he was granted asylum in November 2017, an interview he gave to The Guardian³ while living in Grande-Synthe, and the biography of his instrument written for the displaced objects program.⁴ These events and forms of communication relate in different ways to music, exile, and violence. Their materiality shapes the discourses, narratives, and the music itself, and moreover, the kind of audiences that engaged with them. All these situations were analyzed from an ethnographic perspective, that is, in context, taken in the flow of life and its complexity. This article gave us the opportunity to explore the potential of musical practices (i.e. speaking about, playing, singing, and listening to music) to highlight the kind of violence migrants in transit have to face in forced migration as well as in humanitarian and post-humanitarian contexts.

Recounting border violence

To understand oneself is to be able to tell stories about oneself, stories both understandable and acceptable, especially acceptable.*⁵ (Ricœur, 2013: 21–22)

One consequence of border violence, like other kinds of violence, is the difficulty of building shareable and acceptable narratives of oneself. These experiences of violence, linked to practices of discrimination, are deeply difficult to share and to be conceived of in Europe’s political imagination. This fact has already been considered in migration studies for a long time. Abdelmalek Sayad (1991), for example, demonstrated how the untold keeps shaping the stories of immigration in interviews with immigrants.

Rereading Paul Ricœur to reflect on the diversification of contemporary narrative forms, Myriam Revault d’Allonnes recalls how he insists on the pre-narrative capacity of what we call a life and asks what are the points of support that the narrative, regardless of its form, can find in the living experience of acting and suffering. For Ricœur, the story always leans on a lived experience. But, in certain situations or circumstances, these anchor points may disappear. Invisible lives are, for him, precisely those in which the mediation between human beings (communicability) and the mediation between a human being and himself or herself (self-understanding) are prevented. We can relate this invisibility to what Ricœur says of the four figures of human capacity: the power to say, the power to do, the power to tell, and accountability. Although it seems he has never explicitly addressed the defection of narrative related to invisibility, his whole problematic of narrative identity resulting from “refiguration” paves the way toward such an analysis: being able to speak and tell stories or, conversely, being unable to do so (Revault d’Allonnes, 2011).

But this general analysis seems insufficient to understand the difficulties for exiles to speak, and we propose to go further, first by referring to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988) work, “Can the subaltern speak?” This better reveals the two types of difficulties faced by asylum seekers suffering from border violence. The first is the risk of their “anchor points” disappearing in the lived experience. The second is that the kind of narratives expected in hegemonic European public spheres and Europe’s imagination and political order prevents some stories from being heard or believed and, at the same time, over-exposes biographical narratives of individual suffering.

These considerations lead us to explore the kind of expression that different spaces and situations allow, assuming that one characteristic of border violence as a “limit experience”* is that it is hard to communicate it through common narratives, if not destructive for the subjects who dare to express it (Leclerc-Olive, 2015).

Musical practices, as forms of communication, and the way they are signified in various communication activities, help us to see beyond general statements about the incommunicability of violence. They enable us to analyze, in concrete situations, the forms of power acting, coping and resisting can take. Through telling stories involving musical practices and playing music, one can find ways to express oneself and share one’s experience of violent contexts and situations without “telling.”

Testifying about border violence: Broken instruments

Beshwar explained how his instruments were broken during his journey. First, his guitar was smashed by policemen in Greece, and, laughing, they asked him to play on his broken guitar. Next, a saz he got in Grande-Synthe was broken in Basroch camp by smugglers during a fight. He recounted the first event in an interview with The Guardian.⁶ He told the second story in the biography of his saz, for the displaced objects program.

In these two cases, the wounds inflicted on the instruments exemplify a kind of border violence: physical abuses and practices of humiliation. Telling the story of these wounds is a way of speaking up about physical abuses and humiliations in national media or, in case of the biography of the saz, to a wide and relatively undetermined audience.⁷ It is also a way of revealing how this border violence works, attempting to reduce exiles to a body and a trajectory: a migrant. In particular, the breaking of the instrument at the Greek border prevented Beshwar from being welcomed with his whole humanity, that is to say with his capabilities, thus signifying a life without recognition (Honneth, 2004).

By telling the events of the broken instruments, Beshwar illustrates this particular violence. They highlight the exceptional regime in which asylum seekers have to live: in a context where they are subjected to the violation of their rights and where they are vulnerable to arbitrary violence, even from European police. A large corpus of work documents the specific violence that results from the production of migrant illegality, specifically at European borders (Andersson, 2012; Guenebaud, 2017; Plein droit, 2016).

In the first case, the breaking of the guitar is an act of violence perpetrated by Greek policemen. This violence is experienced in the present context of the militarization of European border control, but it also highlights a history of torture involving musical humiliations during the dictatorship in Greece (1967–1974).⁸ This story can help us understand how violence is rooted both in local political, cultural, and social histories and connected to contemporary and more global policies of control and criminalization of migration. But we must be careful here: in Beshwar’s experience, this history of Greek violence does not “exist”; he was unaware of it at the time, as was the journalist who published the article in The Guardian. But it is there, pointing to a historical ground, and the actions of the policemen actualize this history of violence locally. Beshwar’s public account of what happened opened up the possibility of digging out the history of music in torture practices in Greece, which is precisely what happened to us in writing this article. We can see here how “violence is constituted of several layers: it is part of history of violence where techniques and memories are activated or instrumentalised in order to create actual effects and meanings” (Makaremi, 2016).

The link between a police abuse and the whole policy to criminalize mobility for certain categories of people is not raised in The Guardian article, which focuses on an individual story. From the perspective of the journalist and the article, the violence of the Greek policemen could be seen purely as “individual exactions.”

For Beshwar, transferring the violence from his body to the body of his instrument preserved the integrity of his own body, while making the story of police abuse in Europe readable and printable by a national European media source. Doing so is also a concrete way of saying he was not only a refugee or a migrant or asylum seeker when he arrived. He was also a son, a brother, and a musician, a man with a life that went beyond biological needs or even his search for official asylum. That life indeed he intended to live in Europe, bringing his guitar.

Confronting border violence is achieved by entering the materiality of migration. We use materiality as suggested by Paul Basu and Simon Coleman (2008):

[S]traightforwardly to refer to physical objects and worlds, but also to evoke more varied—multiple—forms of experience and sensation that are both embodied and constituted through the interactions of subjects and objects. Such interactions are often both moving, in the sense that they stir the emotions, and, indeed, moving, insofar as they entail the movement of both people and things, subjects and objects. (p. 317)

As a musician, this testimony of violence includes both the common materiality of border violence committed against undocumented migrants, a materiality made up of walls, camps, and police confrontation, and also the specific materiality of the musical relationship humans and instrument can or cannot maintain, that special link they have with an instrument they take care of, with which they collaborate and create. This is a body-to-body relationship.

We sought to put this relationship at the center of the biography of Beshwar’s saz. Although he had brought his guitar with him, he was given the saz in Basroch camp by other exiles who could not bring it with them on their way to England. This saz, blocked at the border, became his saz and, in the camp, Beshwar became the saz player in a movement of singularization of both Beshwar and his saz. When we wrote this story, we deliberately told something of the violence of the smugglers, but also of the camp itself and the situation at the border. The purpose of this article was also to create a narrative that would emphasize how Beshwar overcame the violence that also fostered solidarity between exiles, who helped to repair his instrument and, through this capability inscribed in his body, maintained his singularity as the camp’s saz player. In the story of the saz, we did not avoid the special kind of power given to Beshwar by the saz itself, its rareness and the curiosity it provoked among certain volunteers, the way this curiosity and attention to his musical abilities, more than to his human rights, made him uncomfortable.

His stories offer a tangible illustration of border violence and how it is experienced by exiles, but also of the way it can be shared. The breaking of the guitar, and then of the saz, tells us something of the specificity of violence at the border: the violence of breaking the links and relationships that support one’s existence. In terms of life, as it is enriched by the networks of caring relationships and cooperative links that human beings build with each other, but also with objects and the natural world they live in, cutting those links and adopting a policy of isolating exiles, reducing them to their body, is also a form of violence against life itself.

These two stories can also be analyzed by drawing on the concept of “continuum of violence” defined by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgeois (2004). They use this concept to understand how categories of people are made vulnerable to violence because of a strong network of political decisions, cultural, and social practices. Becoming “illegal” exposed Beshwar both to police violence and to the violence of smugglers.

This continuum, drawn by the repetition of the same event—the breaking of the instrument—blurs the lines between legitimate violence through border control, police abuses, and other criminal acts and violence. It underlines a dynamic produced by physical violence at the border: violence against the elements of singularization of human beings who enter a zone of exception (Agamben, 2003) and abandon their rights. Border violence in this sense can be seen as part of the whole process of desubjectivation of Europe’s approach to asylum.

Coping with separation

My brother [Beshwar] I hope one day I do everything like you for my life. (This message was posted on Facebook by Mohammed Hassan with a picture of Beshwar playing the saz and singing on 2 August 2016, while he was in England and Beshwar was still in Grande-Synthe.)

This policy of separation also is publicized in other ways by Beshwar’s music. When he arrived in Greece with his mother and brothers, they were separated. His mother was sent with other women to a camp, and Beshwar and his brothers were placed in a prison. After their release from prison, they traveled through Europe, moving from camp to camp to find her. He told this story in different contexts,⁹ but he also wrote a piece of music to express his feelings. He played this piece on stage several times. Each time was an opportunity to briefly recount the story of the separation and reveal the kind of violence inflicted on asylum seekers at Europe’s borders. This way, he could share how he dealt with that violence through a creative act. He wrote this piece in his head during the journey and made the arrangements when they finally reunited.

After he got to England, he produced a video clip and posted it on YouTube.¹⁰ The video is called “When you’ve lost your mother.” The creative process helped him to keep his faith and maintain his mental health during the search, and later, by finding ways of making this event a shareable experience. The video clip is constructed in three parts: the first is a photomontage of several pictures of him and his mother and the title of the interview in The Guardian, with text and a poem to depict his state of mind. The text is in English:

I’m angry like a Lion in the Iceland/alone/like a bird flying in the sky to find a land. I don’t know how I spent my night and my life without my mother/The only wish that I have is give you all my ages to you.

The music is a duduk solo he recorded. For Beshwar, the duduk is an instrument that can activate the nostalgia he feels for the mountains of Kurdistan, which are connected to his childhood. He is also able to make it sound “sad” as he puts it. The second part is a video of himself, playing the saz in front of his shelter in the Grande-Synthe camp. He is playing the piece of music he wrote for his mother. It was recorded with a phone. He does not look at the camera but instead at his hands on the instrument.

The last part is another photomontage of pictures of his mother’s face, smiling lightly, and of him playing in the camp. The music is the duduk solo and the text says,

Is there another Da Vinci/to paint you[r] face and smile?/While you hiding all you sadness under your lips/the mother of jungle. The only light that I have [is] your smile my mother. I feel shame [for] my destiny to keep me far from you . . .

The last text is displayed over a picture of Beshwar playing the saz in the camp. The text thanks “Katjin” for the saz she gave him, “a good saz,” which “makes [him] so happy.”

The reception of the music video is then ensured by the links between the sound of the music and other semiotic elements of the video. The reception of the music as an expression of the ordeal of separation in exile is also framed by the montage. In addition, this video is clearly the work of an amateur, made with no professional video-editing skills. It shows how music is used by Beshwar as “a technology of the self,” as Tia DeNora (2014, 2016) puts it. This technology, she says, is not only individual; its efficacy is linked to the way it connects the listeners and musicians to others, and to social worlds.

Again, this way of giving shape to his feelings through music is a way of sharing a kind of “power of acting” in a situation of violence and of imagining an audience for such a situation. The pain, shame, and sadness are transcended in music, transformed in the capacity to communicate and create. The reception of the video clip also actualizes a “common world” (Tassin, 2004) where the music and video can eventually be shared. This common world is supported by the YouTube platform and the possibility of publication and integration it offers. The platform itself gives a socio-semiotic frame to the video, that is it structures the production and the reception of the video in a way based on the fact that the video will be shared.

The video clip links the listening of music to a depiction of Beshwar’s emotions while he composed it: his love for his mother, anger, sadness, but also shame. It publicizes the extreme precarity of camp life and is also a public acknowledgment of his debt to Katjin, who gave him the saz. This again reveals the ambiguity of solidarity and the extreme dependency of exiles on humanitarian workers or volunteers in the camps. In this situation, music allowed Beshwar to give something back through public recognition.

Exploring Beshwar Hassan’s Facebook account is also a way to dive into these links created by many forms of gifts: material, like the saz, but also the gifts of attention and recognition. In return, lots of volunteers thanked Beshwar for the moments he created with and around music. The relationships of help and support in and through music, mixed with friendship, appear on Facebook,¹¹ and Beshwar manages to link his musical ability to the formation of an audience around his exile, an audience who showed sympathy and was capable of commitment.

The sharing of musical moments on Facebook has also been a cornerstone of the link maintained remotely through social networks by the family when they were separated a second time, between the United Kingdom and Grande-Synthe during the summer of 2016. The brothers were able to send each other “musical addresses” and publicly express through music how they felt toward one another. A special link connected one of the brothers, Mohammed, and Beshwar. In England, Mohammed began to learn how to play the saz explicitly in reference to Beshwar’s practice. Again, the bodily and material aspects of playing music played an important role in Mohammed’s mimetic practices. Facebook is a link-based technology (Casilli, 2010), and has served to publicize this mimetism. Mohammed posted pictures of his brother playing, as well as pictures and a short video of himself playing the saz and training his body and mind to become “as good” as his older brother.

Sharing musical forms of resistance to precarity: Playing by the fire

Making music round the fire at Glastonbury festival. Remembering playing round your fire Beshwar—some of the mud here is approaching Basch standards. But it’s all drying and we get to go home at the end. (Posted on Beshwar Hassan’s wall by one of his friends on 22 June 2016 at 3.11 am)

Another form of violence is readable in the way Beshwar links music and life at the border. This violence is due to the material insecurity faced by undocumented asylum seekers. At the borders, they are often reduced to living in squalor, slums, or makeshift camps in the woods.

On his Facebook account, Beshwar places a lot of importance on music. His profile pictures—himself playing the saz combined with the different names he chooses for his account (Besh Walker and Besh Saz)—and the number of posts about musical experiences in the Grande-Synthe camp show the importance of both music and the camp itself in the way he publicizes his life as asylum seeker.

His account is also a place where he and his “friends,” whether exiles, volunteers, European musicians, or humanitarian workers he met during his journey, are building a specific memory of the camp of Grande-Synthe. They share pictures and memories of their life there. Indeed, one part of the activity on Facebook, after Beshwar and his family got to England, involved exchanging pictures and videos of dancing and music in the camp, some of which were made public, others exchanged privately. In several public posts, Beshwar expressed forms of nostalgia for camp life, and his own astonishment at this nostalgia. Some friends did the same or simply shared the fact that they too recalled these moments of solidarity.

One reason why lots of the pictures and videos shared were of musical experiences is that this material captured by phones of exiles or volunteers was also used to produce a shareable memory of the place. Besides, Facebook’s architecture encourages posting visual material. Such musical experiences become possible “anchor points” in their lives, from which forms of narratives of life in the camp could be appropriated and shared. The fact that musical experiences were captured shows that this potential was anticipated by those involved: as they were being recorded, the exiles could feel the potential of future memory and/or the communicability of the experience. Cellphones were the material tools and their technical possibilities shaped the kind of memories of life violent conditions such as the camp could create. Facebook or other social networks enabled the circulation of this material. Beshwar lost his cellphone and lost lots of videos and pictures. He asked for help on Facebook and was able to retrieve some of the pictures and videos he had shared with others.

On Facebook, the pictures and videos come with texts, either written by the person posting or in comments. The analysis of the posts¹² reveals the emergence of a form of shared narrative of solidarity and resistance to precariousness among the inhabitants of the slums and camps. This narrative is not linear, but fragmented. Its unity is not built through a classic form of biographic narrative, but takes shape through the montage of these fragments.

Of course, the technical architecture of the network facilitates such montage, for example, by suggesting a “souvenir” or encouraging comments. In the fragments, one can find a lot of the untold of the experience of exiles. This kind of narrative can be contrasted with “sedentary epistemologies” marked by the tyranny of continuity (Leclerc-Olive, 2015: 38). This is precisely what makes them particularly interesting in the case of experiences such as exile. Michèle Leclerc-Olive emphasizes the incredible, paradoxical, and inaudible aspects of the exile’s experiences. They are “limit experiences” that cannot be totally narrated in the framework of classical coherent narratives. This co-constructed montage between technology and a network of individuals is a way of giving shape to and sharing, at least partly, this “limit experience.”

Besides, sharing musical experiences reactivates them and also makes it possible to declare an attachment to camp life. This attachment is difficult to understand and share, given the harsh conditions of this life. The shared pictures, narratives, and recollections of musical experiences sustain “another memory of the camp [than the usual one built on images of suffering, mud, etc. . . .], a memory built from the ability of its inhabitants to make and consider it a ‘dwelling place’”* (Puig, 2008). These exchanges form the basis of the production of an ethical community based on a shared memory and close relationships (Margalit, 2002), which implies forms of responsibility toward each other in relation to a duty of memory. This ethical community is not constituted by all of Beshwar Hassan’s friends on Facebook, but by those who commit to the production of this memory. Thus, Facebook makes this work of memory visible to all of Beshwar’s friends and to those with whom the post has been shared.

What kind of shared memory does posting these pictures and videos produce? They produce a memory of the way Beshwar Hassan and those who participated alongside him managed to transform both the precariousness and the violence of the situation by creating a musical interstitial space-time where the power of solidarity could trump precariousness and despair. Some of the posts also linked the celebration of the capacity of exiles to both support and transcend the violence of their living conditions to the celebration of the capacity of musical practices to become agents of that support and to open up cosmopolitan relationships. We can argue that these relationships are not based on equal relations but can also be analyzed from the unequally distributed ability to come and go as one pleases. This is well illustrated in the above-quoted post by Beshwar’s friend, recalling a musical experience by “Besh’s fire in the Barosch camp.” He points to the profound difference between the positions they occupy. He could return home while Beshwar could not.

Finding spaces beyond a biopolitical order?

After considering Giorgio Agamben’s description of the biopolitical order in an effort to understand the situations refugees and asylum seekers face, David Farrier and Patricia Tuitt (2013) conclude that:

the success of a strategic reading of the violence to which the refugee is exposed is determined by the extent to which it looks beyond the biopolitical order. That is to say to look not only to the power of violence to produce victims, but also to the response to violence, and the displacement refugees make in the shred of violence as forms of agency. (p. 257)

These forms of agency take place in the bodies of the musicians and listeners. Music as a form of bodily practice, and the use of music as a technology of the self—a bodily self—are the second key to understanding its importance.

Another body

As the camp’s saz player, Beshwar had opportunities to play on stage, both in the camp and elsewhere. In these circumstances, he could perform with a musician’s body, its stature, and shows his ability to play. Moreover, he could make his audiences feel the music in their body.

Furthermore, Beshwar played Kurdish music in the camp and could link his experience as an exile, along with other inhabitants of the Grande-Synthe camp, to a cultural and political history: the exile of the Kurdish people. They are members of a diaspora in exile in which music has played a key role through Kurdish singers and musicians in exile who served as Kurdish ambassadors like Shahram Nazeri. The concert organized in March 2016 for Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which is important for Kurdish people who use it as an identity-building celebration, can help understand the strength of Kurdish performances in the camp. Beshwar orchestrated the concert, not because he was the best player or teacher, but also because he had the saz, and so he could play a traditional and political repertoire and the audience could dance and teach the volunteers some steps. This was an important moment in the collective life of the camp at the time. Through these musical performances, Beshwar could perform a “Kurdish body,” demonstrating his ability to play the saz and sing a pan-Kurdish repertoire. Georgina Born (2011) emphasizes that other studies show how musical performance is not only entangled in wider social identity formations, but has the capacity to reconfigure or catalyze those formations (p. 380). She cites, in particular, Jocelyne Guilbault’s research on live soca performances in Trinidad, and the way they stress the genre’s transformative capacities as it produces “public intimacies.” With this term, she refers to the sociality and spatial proximities of performance as they unfold between musicians on stage, between musicians and the audience, and between audience members. Guilbault (2010) argues that these embodied and performative social interactions “reiterate identities,” while also enabling “new points of connection [to be] developed (for example among artists and audience members of different ethnicities, nationalities and generations, and across musical genres)” (p. 17). In the context of the camp, we can clearly observe this intertwining of reiteration of identities with new connection points. One of the new connection points is the orientation of the shared musical energy toward the luck needed to successfully cross the border, and, during the concerts, singers often invoke luck. It even happened once that a singer particularly inspired managed to cross during the night, thus reinforcing the faith of the others.

The story of the Kurdish fight for autonomy and its link to the life of the diaspora are articulated through the life in the camp and oriented toward crossing the border and the inherent danger. Connecting and performing a Kurdish identity is important in a context of border and camp life, where social as well as cultural distinctions between the exiles tend to be erased. The categories of “refugees,” “exiles,” or “migrants” catch all terms. Here, one’s singularity is hard to maintain. Moreover, Kurdish music and history are not easy to understand for all volunteers, who may have no knowledge of the region’s music and may tend to consider the performances in an orientalist (Said, 1978) reception of the music. Beshwar had to fight against the reduction of his music to exotic or oriental tunes. In this fight, he used his musical skills and art to tell stories. In the stories and descriptions of Kurdish music he often told to volunteers and humanitarian workers, he always recalled the way the saz itself has a political and contested history in the Kurdish political fight for recognition. The materiality of the saz and the curiosity it attracted allowed him to develop his stories.

Performing before the community of the refugees of Grande-Synthe as Kurdish is not simply important with regard to Kurdish history and a way of situating the act of leaving one’s country in a historical, political, and cultural context. It is also important with regard both to the hegemonic presence of Kurds in Grande-Synthe and to the political context of asylum seeking. First, Kurdish smugglers were powerful and tried to maintain their positions in Grande-Synthe. Second, Beshwar explained many times the importance of considering Kurdish people as “true” refugees, regarding his imagined European’s criteria. Kurds are facing political discrimination, they are allies of Europeans in the war against ISIS and they are in exile with their families. This kind of identity “claim” is understandable considering the political and media coverage of migrant issues. Beshwar’s efforts, including the way he spoke about his music, showed how he tried to position himself and those he cared for in the framework of “moral panic” (Bauman, 2016) related to the political framework of the “migrant crisis.” Claiming his Kurdish identity is, therefore, also a response to a violent and “desingularizing” context.

“Music is my sadness”

Among all the ordeals of exile, sadness is a key topic. Music was Beshwar’s sadness, as he put it. It is music itself that gives shape to and communicates the very chord of his condition of exile. Again, this is a way of resisting and creating a means to communicate about “limit experience.”

The first form of resistance I observed in my fieldwork was the ability of Beshwar’s music to produce feelings that could be shared with other Kurdish refugees in the camp. Some of them often passed by his shelter, just to sit and listen, and cry together. These moments of sadness were not moments of despair, but moments when they could make sense of the difficulty of crossing and even of imagining a future life after the camp. Music opened up a space and time of shareable emotions through a mutual tuning-up. Sadness was the feeling from which memories could emerge and generate resources to face the situation. It could also break the camp’s monotony and organize not only an individual but also a shareable sense of the ordeals of camp life and exile. Beshwar emphasizes that many exiles in the camps were depressed and gave up all hope. For him, music helped to “bring some light back into their eyes.” It helped them to feel and reconnect with a sense of existence. They were looked after by others and given recognition. By playing and sharing his sadness, Beshwar realized he could fight depression, and the absence of feelings, the detached attitude that can lead to self-inflicted violence. This ability of music to express emotions such as sadness has been extensively addressed by the music literature. As DeNora has already stressed, music is not only a resource for individuals to manage their emotions, even though this is a common practice; it is also an experience embedded in our social worlds. Through music, Beshwar, along with other refugees in the camp, was able to develop an aesthetic and affective agency (DeNora, 2000).

The second form of resistance was the way Beshwar found an audience for this sadness on stage and via digital social networks. On stage, this had a special impact. In Grande-Synthe, Beshwar had the opportunity to play with the renowned French-Lebanese musician Ibrahim Maalouf in an important venue, and afterward with several other musicians on different stages. These opportunities to play in front of large audiences created opportunities to communicate about the refugees’ conditions, but also to explicitly share his sadness through music with his audiences and with other musicians who had to find musical ways to collaborate with him.

Ibrahim Maalouf, for example, first came up with the idea of integrating Beshwar into a piece of music that had already been composed, “Revolution.” During the rehearsals, he realized that the saz was not tuned correctly and that it would require too much work to find the right arrangements. Therefore, he decided to play an improvised duo with him. Beshwar played a piece he had composed during his journey, and Ibrahim Maalouf played his trumpet in a call and response musical form. This musical dialogue required improvisation and an ethical approach above all based on mutual listening. They performed on stage and made it clear that Beshwar’s “sad” music could be shared and supported by a musician who did not experience the exact same difficulties—even though, as a Lebanese musician in France, he experienced other forms of exile—and that they could create a cosmopolitan musical world the audiences could share.

The ordinary ethics of improvisation (Becker, 1999) are complemented by the way the musicians took the situation into consideration and tried to reverse its dissymmetry. Ibrahim Maalouf’s presence on stage, deliberately in the background, his trumpet responding to Beshwar’s saz, opened up a space for him to lead the musical conversation and find support in the musical flow. This exchange showed that a “mutual tuning-up” defined by the sharing of a time span, of a “current of consciousness,” could be established. Initially a private feeling, “sadness” could become a public asset. The ethnomusicologist Jean During (2008) explored the question of the relationship between ethics and music, and suggested that:

ethical categories are immediately mobilized by the musical activity itself, to maintain its modes of production, circulation and reception. Moreover, the ethical concern, as soon as it is concretely considered through the question of the effects of music, leads to draw finer differentiations: we can draw a distinction between musics, with their own emotional regimes, which can take various meanings from one context to another; but also between regimes of musical subjectification defining each time singular subjects of performance or of listening, as well as particular modalities of the relation to the other, on the side of the musicians as well as the listeners.*

Here, Etienne Tassin’s (2004) concept of “cosmopolitics” can be helpful to highlight how these situations produce “common worlds” based on a dialogue and a common sense established through the specific process of subjectivation generated by musical performance. In these situations of communication, “sadness” could lead to catharsis through social engagement. Of course, these moments did not change the material conditions of the Kurdish refugees in Grande-Synthe, and we should not attribute a power to music it cannot have, but it did something which should not be overlooked either: it opened up interstitial spaces to inhabit temporarily, and to “furnish,” in the words of Tia DeNora (2016), which means that it produces a kind of sensitive appropriation.

Power

HERE I am on stage with such a nice person Ibrahim Maalof played some music . . .¹³ (Posted on Facebook by Beshwar Hassan on 9 April 2016)

The aim of this last section is to go beyond the usual binary understanding of power relations: in our case, the traditional opposition between, on the one hand, the opportunism and ruses of the exiles and, on the other, the apparatus of power governing camp life. Power is more complex than this. Through music, as we wrote in the biography of the saz, Beshwar reinforced and gave a special tone to his power and leadership in the camp. The political authorities, volunteers, and humanitarian workers behind the creation of the camp depended on its leaders’ goodwill to make it work. They also needed the collaboration of the exiles, who could have refused to stay. Finally, they needed them to show that they were cooperative to maintain the population’s support to the local policy of hospitality. The NGO Utopia 56 and the mayor of Grande-Synthe encouraged the creation of a music band in the camp so they could play during France’s national music holiday (the “Fête de la musique”) with other bands from the city. The Fête de la musique was presented by the mayor as an opportunity to show that the camp was integrated into the city, as a proof of the policy of hospitality he had implemented.

Again, Beshwar’s musical skills were requested. Not only did he take up the opportunity, but he was also the source of imagination for the band created by Utopia 56. It was indeed his musical skills and ability to lead a band that gave Utopia and the mayor the idea for a band of refugees from La Linière camp, after seeing him on stage with Ibrahim Maalouf.

Beshwar led the band and composed the music. The municipality made possible the musicians’ rehearsals in the city’s music school. They had access to a proper studio, a piano, and other instruments. Several times, Beshwar reminded the NGO that he wanted to retain control over his time, and that they had to consult him about organizing rehearsals, if not he would choose to miss some appointments. Doing so, he and the other musicians constantly reminded the NGO and the city government that the success of the project was built on the commitment of the musicians and their goodwill to participate. Ultimately, the will of the Kurdish exiles in Grande-Synthe to cross the border, their desire to live and create, was the energy and power that fuelled this situation. The violence here would be not to recognize this power.

Conclusion

Music is “an extraordinarily diffuse kind of cultural object: an aggregation of sonic, social, corporeal, discursive, visual, technological and temporal mediations—a musical assemblage, where this is understood as a characteristic constellation of such heterogeneous mediations” (Born, 2011), and so music has “a plural and distributed materiality.” This is certainly why musical experiences and practices can be a good field of study through which to understand the complexity of border violence, its consequences, and the specific kind of agency and subjectivation that life in exile, confronted with such violence, can foster. Following Beshwar’s singular story but also his musical expressive resources, exploring music making in the everyday life in situation of border violence can contribute to highlight the role of anthropology in the understanding of violence:

As opposed to the dramatic potential of stories in the media that are successful in focusing attention on a catastrophic event, the potential of anthropology lies in showing both (a) how it is that something can build into a crisis and (b) how events can be carried forward and backward in time. (Das, 2007: 233)

Today, Beshwar Hassan lives in the United Kingdom with his family. Music accompanied his discovery of this new country. The video of his arrival he shared on Facebook showed him singing in his car with a friend, the countryside flying by in the background. His rhythm gave shape to the British landscape. Soon he posted his “first times” on Facebook: the first time he played an organ in an English church, the first time he recorded in a real studio. Music has been part of his specific subjectivation of this new situation, it is still something he shares and through which he gets the recognition of his ability to pull through different situations of exception and of border violence (Honneth, 2004). His Facebook name is now “Beshwar saz” and his public identity is underpinned by his relationship with his instrument, an identity constructed in part through exile. This relationship was built through and against border violence.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Émilie Da Lage

Notes

Author biographies

Émilie Da Lage is a Senior Lecturer in information and communication studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Lille. She works on musical experiences and has been leading fieldwork in Grande-Synthe and Calais since 2015. She recently curated the exhibition and podcast “Radio Fréquences Monde”:

Beshwar Hassan is a Kurdish musician. He studies and lives in Great Britain where he was granted refugee status.

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