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Everyday Geographies, Geographies Everyday: Mundane of Mobilities Made Tangible

April 2021
ACME 18(4):1026-1053

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In this photo essay, a group of six academics contributed to a cross-disciplinary conversation about immigration, mobility and circulation. We tasked ourselves with subverting crisis narratives attached to global migration by exploring the habitual, mundane, and everyday aspects of migration, as well bringing into focus the bodily, intimate and affective dimensions of mobility. Each co-author selected one or more photographs they had taken of an object or daily practice that illustrates the immediacy, tangibility, and materiality of global mobility, migration and circulation from their perspective as an academic or practitioner in their own discipline. We each also wrote mini-essays to contextualize and explicate these photographs. The result is part photo-essay and part collage. As the various pieces juxtapose with one another, themes of temporal stretching, melancholy, dis/orientation, and the rhythms and cycles of everyday life that are altered and interpenetrated by the mobilities and circulations of people and objects arose. This collective piece also registers the blurring boundaries between everyday life and research practice, individual and collective conversation, work and pleasure. The practice of producing this collective photo-essay was not only the result of the convening of an interdisciplinary study group on immigration, mobility and circulation, but also of a deliberate experiment with practicing promiscuous scholarship and slow scholarship.

Some members of the Immigration, Mobilities, and Circulation Working Group.

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Keyboard with two alphabets.

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Eritrea faces the Red Sea in the Horn of Africa region.

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Disappearing friends.

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The Freesa application form.

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Figures - uploaded by Tamir Arviv

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Content uploaded by Tamir Arviv

Content may be subject to copyright.

Published with Creative Commons licence: Attribution–Noncommercial–No Derivatives

Everyday Geographies, Geographies Everyday:

Mundane of Mobilities Made Tangible

Laura Bisaillon

University of Toronto Scarborough

lbisaillon@utsc.utoronto.ca

Leah Montange

University of Toronto

leah.montange@mail.utoronto.ca

Alberto Zambenedetti

University of Toronto

alberto.zambenedetti@utoronto.ca

Paolo Frascà

University of Toronto

paolo.frasca@mail.utoronto.ca

Lina El-Shamy

University of Toronto

lina.el.shamy@mail.utoronto.ca

Tamir Arviv

Technion-Israel Institute of Technology

tamir.arviv@campus.technion.ac.il

Creative | Alternative

Everyday Geographies, Geographies Everyday 1026

Abstract

In this photo essay, a group of six academics contributed to a cross-disciplinary conversation about

immigration, mobility and circulation. We tasked ourselves with subverting crisis narratives attached

to global migration by exploring the habitual, mundane, and everyday aspects of migration, as well

bringing into focus the bodily, intimate and affective dimensions of mobility. Each co-author selected

one or more photographs they had taken of an object or daily practice that illustrates the immediacy,

tangibility, and materiality of global mobility, migration and circulation from their perspective as an

academic or practitioner in their own discipline. We each also wrote mini-essays to contextualize and

explicate these photographs. The result is part photo-essay and part collage. As the various pieces

juxtapose with one another, themes of temporal stretching, melancholy, dis/orientation, and the rhythms

and cycles of everyday life that are altered and interpenetrated by the mobilities and circulations of

people and objects arose. This collective piece also registers the blurring boundaries between everyday

life and research practice, individual and collective conversation, work and pleasure. The practice of

producing this collective photo-essay was not only the result of the convening of an interdisciplinary

study group on immigration, mobility and circulation, but also of a deliberate experiment with practicing

promiscuous scholarship and slow scholarship.

Keywords

Circulation; everyday; immigration; intimacy; materiality; mobility

Introduction

This multi-authored photo essay stands as an expression of feminist praxis, pedagogy and

interdisciplinary scholarship and partnership. It is the fruit of a dedicated process through which we put

the “tools of social science, friendship, and the power of conversation” to use to produce a scholarly

contribution greater than the sum of its parts (Mountz, 2016, 207). We are members of an interdisciplinary

group called the (Im)migration, Mobilities and Circulation Collective. This scholarly group was co-

chaired by University of Toronto faculty members Professors Laura Bisaillon, Elizabeth Harney, and

Rachel Silvey during the 2016-17 academic years. The rationale that brought us together was a shared

curiosity in exploring how interdisciplinarity—as a scholarly commitment, deliberate intellectual

approach, and set of accompanying practices—valuably enlivens and expands our substantive focus on

human migrations, movements and mobilities.

Our photo essay traverses the multilocal and multilingual spaces connecting historic and

contemporary Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, North and the East Africa, and North

America. The living and working conditions of our lives, in our role as academics, but also as friends,

family members and colleagues, likewise sentient, carnal and mobile human subjects, provide the

empirical basis for our discussions and analyses. We unabashedly “practice intellectual promiscuity”

(Bisaillon, 2017, 28) by drawing from myriad intellectual resources from the social sciences and

humanities. We seek to pique the interest of and stimulate dialogue with social geographers and

social scientists of other stripes that share our penchant, proclivity and preference for imaginative

scholarly promiscuousness. As the reader will discover, we deliberately deploy and exploit instances

and interchanges of contradiction, tension and dissonance we have noted around us over time and

across space and place as the massively vital analytic resources that they are, unquestionably. We set

photographs and maps in dialogue with each other, inviting the reader to share and contemplate the sets

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019, 18(4): 1025-1053 1027

of embodied experiences and taken-for-granted or mundane new knowledge that we offer on the subject

of mobilities, migrations and circulations of various kinds.

 Wehaveorganizedourphotoessayintothreeparts.Werstidentifyanddiscussourscholarly

project to provide the reader with grounding to understand our Collective and its work. Secondly, we

present a series of six mini-photo essays through which we hear the voices of all authors. These pieces

are at once each of our contributions and a collective photomontage produced in culmination of an

iterative,sharedprocessthatwematuredoveronecalendaryear.Ratherthanargueforthesignicance

of the bodily, intimate, and affective dimensions of human migrations, movements and mobilities, we

took these as our analytic starting points. In doing so, we created a collage of analyses questioning

representations of the body, intimacy and affect, while marshaling and extending our engagement

withthem.Lastly,wereectontheendeavourofboththeCollectiveand this photo essay.Wehope

our contribution encourages communities of scholars, students and practitioners variously located to

understand the immense personal pleasure and professional productivity that come from transgressing

and subverting disciplinary and other imposed boundaries. Doing so opens up possibilities to learn from

each other, spark new friendships, build communities of practice, support each other’s creativity, and

birth robust scholarship.

PART 1: Mobility, Rhythm, Time: From Slow Scholarship to Promiscuous Scholarship

Our Collective’s meetings took place during the moments in time of so-called refugee ‘crises’

and forced migrations from the Global South into the Global North, including into the country we all

resided in, Canada. The overarching conceptual organizer of our group was to engage with the ideas

of time, rhythm and pace that were our sponsor, the Jackson Humanities Institute’s annual themes. We

were also wedded to examining emergent visions and imagined spaces, which we had selected as our

thematic subtitle. And so, from the beginning of our year together, we explored how these ideas might

poke and probe, align with, invert or subvert the notion of human migration as de facto crisis or disaster.

In this pursuit, we brought forward and discussed contributions from contemporary visual arts,

humangeography,anthropology,musicandethnomusicology,andlmandmuseumstudies.Inkeeping

with the desire to encounter emerging visions and imagined spaces, and the transformative politics

theseimply,atourrstmeetingweinvitedAlisonMountztodiscusswithusherongoingprojectsin

global migration detention and also the concept and exercise of slow scholarship. We read the manifesto

“For Slow Scholarship,” in which she and a collective of fellow North American feminist geographers

argued for the urgent need to approach and practice our scholarly work with slowness and with an

orientation that values care, creativity and collaboration (Mountz et al., 2015). Up for discussion was

how to bring to life intellectual space in an academic institution so as to enable creative, collective

scholarship through commitments to sociability, support and stepping away from a world addicted to

beingbusy(Sa,2014).Fromtherstmeetingforward,wecommittedtooperationalizingtheguidance

and commitment to practice mapped out in Mountz et al. (2015).

Our monthly meetings were structured with the theme of slow scholarship in mind: they were

low-stakes encounters that involved a modest amount of preparation. We sought to deliberately push

back and challenge “the unsustainable pace of work by changing engagements with [scholarly] time”

(Mountz 2016, 216) while we also ventured into substantive questions connected with the eld of

migration studies. We convened over dinner at the end of the working week, and, following short

presentations on our scholarship by guests and group members, we engaged in high-spirited, open-ended

exchanges.Thesegatheringswereinterspersedwithencounterssuchaspubliclmscreeningsandpanel

discussions of our initiation or that we had a hand into organizing. Our twenty-eight members included

women and men faculty members, Canadian and international postdoctoral fellows, undergraduate and

Everyday Geographies, Geographies Everyday 1028

Figure 1: Some members of the Immigration, Mobilities, and Circulation Working Group.

graduate students from the University of Toronto and nearby academic institutions (such as Wilfred

Laurier, York, and Ryerson Universities), as well as one faculty colleague who participated via Skype

from University of California-Irvine. We met eight times between September 2016 and April 2017.

Our monthly gatherings were milieus of scholarly sociability. We had common interest in

approaching substantive research areas through interdisciplinary experimentation and boundary

transgressing. This buoyed our individual and collective spirits, and enhanced our efforts. In the way

that the collective that wrote “For Slow Scholarship” reported feeling fatigued and strained when they

metforthersttime,manyofourgroupmembersattendedmeetingsrathersubduedand‘lowenergy’:

wearrivedface-to-faceattheconclusionofworkingweekslledbyresearch,teaching,service,family,

and commuting, among other roles and responsibilities. Out of respect for the various demands that we

knew to be placed on each other outside our monthly haven, we put effort into ensuring that our meetings

offered at once vibrant, and low-stakes, low-demand commitments for thinking, feeling, listening and

communing.

Our work together was anchored by an angle of analysis that saw migration, mobility and human

circulation not as crisis or something out of the ordinary, but as a mundane and everyday occurrence.

What happens when we refuse to consider migration, mobilities and circulation as crises, but rather,

as situated within a genealogy of habitual and historically patterned human ow? In our focus on the

mundane, we contemplated how individuals perform and create spaces of meaning, representation, and

home for themselves in, for example, Asian seniors’ residences and within various diasporic LGBTQ

communities in Toronto. We learned about contemporary forms of adversity and trauma experienced

by nationals from Iran, Italy, and Iraq and people of their diasporas. We were confronted with forms of

immobility and people’s quiet resistance within a totalitarian regime in Eritrea. By focusing on these

cases, our members were able to construct wider imaginaries and generate insights about the meanings

of mobility and displacement. Through this lens, the politics of fear, security and the management of

“ows”weresupplantedbyadifferentsetofconcerns:intimacy,melancholy,loss,nostalgia,memory,

trauma, and the everyday practices through which people mediate and cope with their cross-border

mobility. We argue that the methodological and substantive cross-fertilizations and insights that we made

wouldnothavetakenroot,sproutedorourishedasrichlyastheydid,hadwenotdeliberatelyengaged

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019, 18(4): 1025-1053 1029

in slow scholarship. But such an approach also promulgated in our work a promiscuous scholarship,

one where the blurring of boundaries, cross-fertilization, sociability, and a gaze towards the everyday,

intimate and personal deeply reverberates through our tone and the themes we take up.

In the six mini-essays below, the results of this experimental exercise are manifest. From

the larger membership of the Collective, a small group of us were able to commit to taking July and

August 2017 to explore themes that had emerged during our year together. We tasked each other with

contributing a small set of photographs of objects or practices that evoked emerging temporalities

and spatialities relating to the three words in our Collective’s name: (im)migration, mobilities and

circulation.Weeachprovidedthephotosofobjects:adoor,a ag,akeyboard,abag,anavocado,a

document. We wrote explications of these photographs that also engaged our own personal narratives.

We intentionally focused on objects in order to focus our attention on the everyday rather than on crises

and spectacles, but this ultimately meant we would all introduce themes that were personal, and even

intimate: what we came across during a family trip, in our correspondence, or when on a retreat; or,

thepersonalreectionsthatcameupwhileataconference,orwhileproducingeldworkorcreative

works. The emphasis on everyday rhythms imbued our work, as the photo selections and their attendant

reectionsallblurredtheboundariesbetweenourindividualeldsofstudyandourlivesoutsideour

scholarship. During this time, we read each other’s work, discussed, and provided each other with

collegial guidance, commentary and suggestions for change. Speaking across disciplinary boundaries,

and working slowly, we deliberately directed our attention to what was personal both in substance and

in tone. The six of us took up this challenge, and in so doing, troubled the waters of dominant framings

of mobile people and their circumstances.

Everyday Geographies, Geographies Everyday 1030

El Immigrant: Linguistic Terrorism and

the Materiality of Being In-Between

photo and essay by Lina El-Shamy

Part 2: Six Photo Essays

This is a photograph of my keyboard (Fig. 2), where the Arabic alphabet stickers that I purchased

on eBay are slowly peeling away from my monolingual Latin alphabet keyboard. It is also a photograph

IusedinmydocumentarylmEl Immigrant (2015) to symbolize the struggle of not losing a mother

tongue and being tied between two languages and cultures. I still remember what triggered me to

look at my keyboard—something that now seems so apparent. Having decided to start a project on

theimmigrantexperience,I felt confused as towhereIshouldlookrst.Researchingtheimmigrant

experience entails engaging with many different ideas about identity and assimilation, a lot of abstracted

theoryonthe‘in-between’anddiasporicliving,anddifcult stories of border-crossingand survival.

But, where was I to begin?

My teacher, Patricio Davila, encouraged me to look at the material world around me, and to go

from there. Immediately, that is what I did. My laptop was right there and I did not need to go far in

ordertondastory.Ifollowedthesamestrategythroughoutthelm,featuringthepeopleIfoundwhen

I searched more closely around me, not beyond me: family members, a university classmate, a local

entrepreneur, a local dry cleaning worker, friends, a friend’s father, a local taxi driver, a high school

Figure 2: Keyboard with two alphabets.

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019, 18(4): 1025-1053 1031

teacher, and a friend’s elementary school teacher, among many others. They all came from completely

different worlds that I imagined could never intersect, but the forced juxtaposition of their stories

(through the power of montage) revealed compelling frictions. For instance, in one shot I interview an

elementary school teacher from Iran who is struggling to enter the Canadian education system, followed

by a shot of a current elementary school teacher (whose interview with me had nothing to do with

immigration) advising everybody to never give up on their dreams, that “you have to do what you want

to do, or you won’t be happy.”

The title, El Immigrant, is a linguistic hybrid that reects the hybridized language that all

immigrants everywhere begin to speak upon arriving. ‘El’ means ‘the’ in both Arabic and Spanish.

In the slow process of losing their mother tongue, immigrants hold on to simple words and phrases

suchasthearticle‘el’asawaytoreafrmtheiridentitiesandhistories.Identityisnotjustanabstract,

internalized feeling; it is a lived, material reality: the languages our tongues (are allowed to) speak, the

professions we (are allowed to) practice, and the alienation resulting from the physical and linguistic

distances created between generations. This is why, in my lm, I decided to conduct all interviews

not in the interviewees’ mother tongue. I found that communicating in English, which is sometimes

their second or third language, might tell a more realistic story—might indeed better demonstrate the

problem of linguistic barriers. Does a story change in any way if it is communicated in a language that

isnotthespeaker’srstlanguage?

Chicana cultural theorist, Gloria E. Andzaldúa, explored the idea of linguistic terrorism in her

semi-autobiographical book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1999). She freely switches

between English and Spanish as a way to express her ties to a multitude of cultures. In her essay “How

to Tame a Wild Tongue,” she labels the critique of and hostility towards a person’s accent or language as

‘linguistic terrorism’, since linguistic identity and ethnic identity are intertwined. Linguistic terrorism is

found in the imperialist imposition of the English language, the universal language that everyone should

speakiftheyaretounderstandandbeunderstood—animperialismImyselfdemonstrateinthelmby

deciding to conduct all interviews in English, only.

My experience with such an imposition happened to me as a child growing up in the Arab world.

I attended an international school that taught an American curriculum, with all the subjects (except

‘Arabic’) taught in English. Outside the classroom and at home was where Arabic would be used—or,

where we were allowed to use it. English was the language of professionalism and academia (and

‘coolness’, of course), whereas Arabic was the language of domesticity and emotions. Our textbooks

spoke a completely different language than the one we spoke at home. It was quite a task to reconcile

what the textbook said with what our parents said. Our math textbooks used dollars, dimes and nickels;

oursciencetextbooksdescribedseasonswehadneverheardof—weweresobehind.Whenwenally

moved to Canada, I remember thinking how the snow was a miracle, as though my old science textbooks

came to life.

 Usingmyownstoryasanimmigrantwasanafterthoughtformylm;Iwasoriginallyresistant

to do so. I deemed my contribution to be not as original as other people’s stories. Then I realized that

thisisexactly why Ishouldincludeit in mylm.Thisstoryis not original; it is every immigrant’s

story. As I type these paragraphs, the Arabic alphabet stickers that were once on my keyboard have

completely peeled off. Maybe I will order another set, and maybe not.

Everyday Geographies, Geographies Everyday 1032

Immigration Detention: Circuits of Waste/

Value, Abject/Human

photos and essay by Leah Montange

Figure 3: My purse, made by a man

detained by Immigration Customs

Enforcement in the US.

A man detained at one of the largest immigration prisons in the US made the bag in this photo

(Fig. 3) for me out of folded green and silver soup wrappers, woven and sewn together with thread made

out of garbage bags. We had been pen pals for about six months, emailing each other weekly through

an email system that allows family and friends (for a fee) to stay in touch with people incarcerated

in prisons and detention centers that subscribe to the service. I wrote with this man not for research

purposes, but simply as a way to maintain a practice of solidarity with those affected by violent and

neoliberal state systems back home in the US while I embarked upon graduate studies in Canada. Over

the course of our exchange, my pen pal was taught by other men in his unit how to “make stuff” out of

wrappersandothersuperuousmaterials.Ibegantounderstandtheobjectshemadewithinthecontext

of political economies of migration and detention and the politics of contestation in detention centers.

According to data published by the National Immigration Justice Center in 2018, the US

immigration detention system is massive and complex: on an average night in 2017, 44,442 migrants,

asylum seekers, and non-citizens who lost status were detained in a combination of contracted beds in

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019, 18(4): 1025-1053 1033

Figure 4 (a,b): Crafts made by detained artist on display

at art gallery.

local jails and dedicated detention centers that are

either federally run or privately operated. In 2017,

about 70% of all immigration detention beds in

the US were privately owned and managed, and

these include the beds at the facility where my

pen pal resided. Food served by the for-prot

detention center is of low quantity and quality.

Still hungry after an unappetizing meal, detainees

will often buy supplemental food, such as soup

packets and a variety of snacks, at the overpriced

commissary. This has been the focal point of

ongoing hunger strikes and struggle at various

detention center; for example, shortly before we

composed this photo-essay, in June 2017, 35

women went on hunger strike at the Northwest

Detention Center in Tacoma, WA. Among their

demands were improved meal plans that include

fruit, and a lowering of commissary prices. But

this situation also yields a variety of practices

beyond such ruptures and outward signs of

resistance. Some detained people will collect the

remnants from commissary food—the various

coloured wrappers—and fold them into a variety

of objects: picture frames, decorations, and

handbags. These can be sent to family members

or relatives as gifts or can be sold in order to

make more money to spend on phone calls and

at the commissary. The economies of detention,

and the bodily experience of these economies,

resonate through my bag, in a process akin to

what Hiemstra and Conlon (2016) have called

“the intimate economies of detention,” or the up

close and personal circulations of material objects,

money,exchangeandprotthatareimplicatedin

immigration detention.

The pen pal who made my bag has presented his creations in two different art exhibitions with

themes of border control and immigration enforcement. Their inclusion in these shows (Fig. 4) urged

me to begin to consider and interpret my bag differently. The temporalities of detention are expressed

here. From one of my pen pal’s artist statements: “It is sad that there is not much we can do here. When i

was in prison i made metal art, wood art, leatherwork, Native American beadwork and so much more. In

[detention] it feels like my hands are tight.” In prisons, time is cumulative – one can count down the days

until one is released. Depending on the facility, one can participate in programs and earn degrees and

certicates.Butindetention,timeisnotcumulative.Theexperienceofdetentionisoftencharacterized

byindenite or indeterminateperiodsofwaiting. Daily schedules,timetables,and mobilities within

the detention center are highly regulated, but at the same time, detained people won’t know and cannot

plan for when their detention will end or where and when they will be transferred. Scholars such as

Papadopoulos, Tsianos and Stephenson (2008) and Andrijacivic (2010) have emphasized how detention

Everyday Geographies, Geographies Everyday 1034

and deportation decelerate migration processes, regulating the temporality of migration by forcing

people to pause, temporarily immobilizing them or redirecting their mobility. The creations of detained

people are an intervention into these temporalities, a way for people to structure their own time and

body, to invest themselves into something, and create. Crafting and making is one strategy for dealing

with this temporal regulation, with the stretching and wasting of time, with the waiting for decisions,

for court dates, for deportation dates.

 Wecanalsopeelbacktheeconomicrelationscongealedinmybagtondmultipleiterationsof

a waste-value relation at work here: migrants are racialized through their border-crossing, and exposure

to policing, racial proling and exclusion; they are gured through that racialization as disposable

people who can be exposed to dangerous, precarious, and risky forms of employment and economic

marginalization (De Genova, 2010). But, that which was de-valorized and made into waste can be re-

valorized.Thosewhoareguredasdisposablearere-valorizedintheirdetention,whereotheractors

produce value by sorting, warehousing and disposing of (deporting) them. Furthermore, the detention

center where my pen pal made my bag is located within a superfund site—a 12 square mile area of

landand shallow waterthattheUSEnvironmentalProtectionAgencyhas identiedascontaminated

with hazardous waste. In 2004, a portion of this wasteland found its “highest and best use” in the

warehousingofdeportable,disposablesubjects.Encompassedinmywrapperpurse,wendremnants

of surplus bodies being warehoused and sorted on contaminated land by a private corporation seeking to

revalorizeallthiswaste.But,wealsondresonancesofpeoplewhoarediligentlyrefusingtobecome

waste, who are using this wasted time in their lives, to make things out of discarded wrappers. It is such

a sharp illustration of the relation between waste and value, and also between the abject and the human.

Indeed, though writing of a different context, Vicki Squire (2014) came to a similar conclusion, that

“struggles to transform ‘desert/ed trash’ into objects of value are nothing less than contestations over the

very category of ‘the human’ itself” (p. 20). That is, considering the wrapper purse in its imbrication in

detained peoples’ temporalities and the circuits of waste/value in detention reveals something different

about detention and the process of objectifying a human: that process involves a relation between the

sovereign power and the detained subject that, though asymmetrical, is not unidirectional, and the

tension between the abject and the human is therefore unresolved.

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019, 18(4): 1025-1053 1035

On Being ‘Young and Deant’ in Asmara

photos and essay by Laura Bisaillon

 ThoughIhaveafteen-yearhistorywiththeHorn ofAfricaregion,thatisDjibouti,Eritrea,

Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan, I had never been to Eritrea (Fig.5). This changed in July 2016 when I

travelled there to attend a family wedding and take part in the Second International Conference on

Eritrean Studies. Committing to slowing down and being rather than doing in a place opens up wonderful

opportunities to see, hear, smell, touch and taste the features of a place and all that happens there (Mountz

et al., 2015). The unhurried pace and my insider-outsider position (Contreras, 2015) meant that I had

much time and opportunity to observe in ways that were particularly informative and interesting. I was

anoutsiderinthissocialmilieubecauseofmyinabilitytouentlyspeakandunderstandthelanguages

in most frequent usage in Eritrea. Yet, I have also been accepted as a member of my husband’s family,

people of both Ethiopian and Eritrean lineage, and, as such, I felt myself belonging to a community in

Figure 5: Eritrea faces the

Red Sea in the Horn of

Africa region.

Everyday Geographies, Geographies Everyday 1036

I took the four photos in this essay, during our month stay in Eritrea. During my time in there,

I interacted with resident (as opposed to diaspora) people of various ages, histories, and social classes,

all of whom were urbanites. I learned about the events and circumstances of their lives, both past and

present. They mused to each other and me about their futures. I conceived of my interlocutors as expert

knowers of the events of their lives and local worlds, since “only the experiencer can speak of her or his

experience,” including that which the person experiences as enabling and disabling (Smith, 2006).

In recent years, television sets across the world, including those in Eritrea, have broadcast the

sites and sounds of human suffering and death, as well as people’s relief and safe passage in various

land and water spaces connecting Africa with Europe. Eritrea has a small population estimated to

bevemillioninhabitants.Thismeansthattheuprootingandeeing work that Eritreans who leave

the country do cannot but be felt in the country. Their absence does not go unnoticed. Eritreans are

overrepresented in deaths in the intercontinental crossings I refer to above (Médecins sans Frontières,

2017). The material scarcity and variety of oppressions that my friends and family in Eritrea endure

are, in a word, troubling. These arrangements have serious effects on people’s wellbeing. As I watched,

learned and listened to the people I met, I began to contemplate and, in dialogue with them, explore

answers to the following questions: What sort of politics and social commitments do people that do not,

cannot,or choosenottoleaveEritreaexpressandenact?Specically,howdoes itfeeltobesocially

young, that is, either unmarried or without children (Clark-Kazak, 2011), and held back in a state that

does not permit young people to exit, lawfully, except under exceptional circumstances (Riggan, 2014)?

Immediately below, I explore the contours of answers and analysis I proffered from these encounters

through two vignettes that emphasize people’s practices.

‘Saloning’ as practice

There is a long-standing coffee drinking and coffee house culture in Eritrea. In the evenings,

it is common to see young people strolling leisurely along the streets and gathering to chat in cafés

inAsmara.Inthephoto above, sixmen,veofwhomarelong-standingfriends, shareadrinkanda

meal (Fig. 6). They meet daily, when possible. They are close. On the occasion pictured here, I am

invited to join, and conversations take place in both Tigrinya and English. During their ‘salon’, the men

Figure 6:

Disappearing

friends.

Eritrea because of collectivist understandings of family and kinship relations.

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019, 18(4): 1025-1053 1037

Figures 7 & 8:

Being erased.

explore topics personal and social. They use humour, irony and parody in equal measure. Talking about

domesticpolitics,theyactivelyavoidnamingspecicpublicgures.Theypracticedeliberateexclusion

of the latter. Our evening is lively. When I am not present, I am told that updates are shared about whom,

among the people they know, has left the country, and who was caught and/or jailed for attempting to do

so. While naturally each of these men has aspirations about the future, if one were preparing to leave, I

am told that he is unlikely to divulge. In the year that preceded my taking of this photo, twelve buddies

gathered around the table regularly. The bodies of friends unseen here, those who were successful in

their “illegal” emigration, (Khosravi, 2010) are conspicuous in their absence. This night, the men talk

about them. In doing so, they deliberately remember their friends. The il/legality of crossing Eritrea’s

national borders is the reason I concealed the men’s faces in this photograph. As I took it, and also as

Ireectonit,thisphoto“whisperstoafuture”(Tippett,2017):sinceIcapturedthisscene,oneofthe

friends seated escaped from the country, making it into Ethiopia through Eritrea’s southern border.

Anotherofthesemen,afterfouryearsofgatheringhard-to-getofcialdocuments,wasgrantedanexit

visa to pursue graduate studies abroad.

‘Social autopsy’ as practice

I talked with and listened to family and friends while enjoying coffee ceremonies during our

month in Eritrea. At one of these services, a group of young women and men talked about their position,

as youth, in their country. They talked about the human exodus from Eritrea and its consequences for

their families and society. They also spoke about their erasure as a matter of social fact: that they were

being actively erased was as evident to them as the faceless woman and man depicted in this pair of

photographs (Fig. 7 & 8). These are photos of two washroom doors in an Asmara café. The paint is

visibly worn and tired. The padlock that fastens the women’s door can be used to keep people in or out.

According to these youth, in the eyes of the country’s administrative leaders, they are more potentially

disruptive and harmful inside the country than outside. From their understanding of how their society

isorganized,exodusservesandsatisesthestatusquo.Usingtheir“sociologicalimagination”(Mills,

1959, 2000), this group of urban youth makes sophisticated and empirically traceable connections

between personal struggles, family biographies, and social problems. Through such “social autopsy” or

analysis, (Klinenberg, 1999) they elucidate lineaments of ruling relations governing them. For example,

allfamiliesofpeopleImetwitharealmostentirelydependentonnancialremittancesfromrelatives

Everyday Geographies, Geographies Everyday 1038

outside of Eritrea. Some families have no other income. Families whose elders have had professional

licences forcibly revoked by the state live very precariously. I was told that these arrangements are

limiting, not liberating. We see that youth are being positioned to feel strain in an ongoing way over

time and across space.

‘Saloning’ and ‘social autopsy’ as discussed here are practices of quiet contest through which

the people I met are dealing with the pain of being resident Eritreans. While not necessarily audible,

personal loss, sorrow, and melancholy are indeed manifest in what we do. Victoria Bernal (2014, 2017)

and I both focus attention on silence and talk to uncover subtle and obvious ways that chronic loss,

material deprivation, and social and structural violence shape the lives of Eritrean inside and outside the

country. The urban youth I met dispute, if not fully reject, the state’s idea that they need to continue to

suffer for the country. Their imagined futures involve supporting families from outside the country. They

live and work to ‘illegally’ exit, while imagining tomorrow’s lived elsewhere, anywhere elsewhere.

In his illuminating ethnography entitled Young and Deant in Tehran (2008), Shahram Khosravi

explores the work of urban youth in Tehran, Iran’s capital city. As I write these words, being “young

anddeant”inEritreainvolvessubtlepracticesofdeance.Recognizingsuchsubtletiesmeanspaying

analytic attention to the spoken and unspoken. It also means problematizing people’s taken-for-granted

practices, and prioritizing “views from below” (Haraway, 1988). From these vantage points, we can

identify and explore how young people are asserting their personhood in practice. Here, we see that the

young featured here are raising questions for their present. They are also engaging in acts of “community

citizenship”, where civic responsibilities are expressed through acts of solidarity with people close to

them and of their choosing, with whom they have affective relations, rather than with the state or

another amorphous or distal actor (Mamdami, 1996).

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019, 18(4): 1025-1053 1039

Notes on (the Absence of) Paths

photos and essay by Alberto Zambenedetti

“The Absence of Paths,” Tunisia’s national pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, is a piece

of performance art staged in three points across the island for the duration of the massive 2017 art

exhibition. On a hot early summer day, I queue up with other visitors at the Arsenale booth, where a clerk

hands out applications for a “Freesa,” a Universal Travel Document—the portmanteau combines “free”

and “visa” into a provocative bureaucratic impossibility. The blue box at the top of the application form

recallsthatofaUScustomsform,butthelatter’ssetofquestionsisreplacedwithaffectivereections

such as “Where do you belong?” The Freesa form also invites the applicant to “Circle Home” on a small

image of a stylized Pangea (the original supercontinent)—the online version using a conventional world

map and physical address (Fig. 9).

With its purposefully incongruous pairing of dry, bureaucratic boxes and colour scheme and

its personal, even emotional line of questioning, the form succeeds in disorienting me. I don’t know

how to reconcile those things, so I trace a circle around the entirety of Pangea, smugly attempting to

circumvent the issue. The clerk, brushing off my embarrassed sarcasm with disarming sincerity, says

thatitis,infact,theonlyrightanswer.Atrst,wecrosslanguages:IspeaktohiminItalian,andhe

responds in English—the suffocating tourism industry in Venice prompts most operators to default to it.

Figure 9: The Freesa

application form.

Everyday Geographies, Geographies Everyday 1040

Figure 10: My Freesa, with the “Only Human” stamp

and my thumbprint.

Figure 11: My mobility map.

Then I switch to English while he politely moves

to Italian. We generate unnecessary confusion in

our brief interaction: true to form, the bureaucracy

of borders is never straightforward, not even as

performance art. He inks my right thumb and

presses it on a piece of paper, a procedure I am

all too familiar with because of my own mobility.

Henallyissuesmeablue passport that is very

similar to another one I used to have, a US Re-

entry Permit—Form I-327, a document that

allows permanent residents to leave the US for

extended periods of time without abandoning

residency. The Freesa is rubber stamped with the

seal “Only Human.” My status: “Migrant.” The

clerk directs a blue light onto the Freesa, revealing

thewatermarkedandligreedpapertheyusedto

makeitlookas“ofcial”aspossible(Fig.10).

With the Freesa in my pocket, I

continue to wander through the Biennale. A

recent experience comes to mind. One month

earlier, I attended the “Space and Culture” 20th

Anniversary Conference: The Idea of Place, in

Edmonton, Alberta. At this point, Canada had

been my new place of residence for less than a

year. The conference was a professional gathering

of sociologists, so I was very much out of my

element, but so were some of the geographers,

urban planners, and other media scholars in the

room. The crowd was eclectic, and I had been

assigned to chair the rst session of the day, in

which I was also presenting my own work—

something to do with photography, space, and

temporality. Taking an active approach, the rst

panelist, a local artist named Brittney Roy, invited

the international (and sleep-deprived) audience to

think about place by charting their own mobility.

She handed out Sharpies and standard-sized

ashcards,andpeoplebegantodraw.Hereismy

drawing (Fig. 11).

After I was done, I realized that I

represented Europe and North America as a

nine-box grid, the different squares standing in

for the countries where I have been employed,

in some capacity, over the last twenty years. My

mind rushed to the places, the jobs, the friends,

the streets, the paycheques, the phone cards, but

mostly to the immigration documents. The black

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019, 18(4): 1025-1053 1041

lines separating the locations, arbitrary obstacles for the arrows to overcome, reminded me of the

hoursspentlling out forms,queuingatconsulates,signing waivers tosurrendermyprivacy,being

photographed,quizzed,ngerprinted.AsIrecallthisinaswelteringVeniceafternoon,myhandclutches

my freshly-inked Freesa.

In 1999, the same year I became a so-called mobile subject, Ahiwa Ong published Flexible

Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. In that pre-9/11 world, Ong described a form of

privileged mobility that “refers to the cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacement

thatinducesubjectstoresponduidlyandopportunisticallytochangingpolitical-economicconditions”

(6). In her view, these relations were “shaped within the mutually reinforcing dynamics of discipline

and escape” (19), and they dealt with the problematic nature of identity in late modernity, in which

“exibility, migration, and relocations, instead of being coerced or resisted, have become practices

to strive for rather than stability” (19). Looking back at those words, in the midst of the largest surge

of human mobility since the Second World War, we realize that the paradigm has shifted, and that the

Freesa exposes its absurd new logic: “In crisis, nation-states pit protection of their own citizens against

a broader commitment to protect human rights. Contradictory projects are carried out daily in the name

of vague security agendas” (17), observes Alison Mountz (2010), whose work examines borders and

humansmugglingacrossthem.Twodecadeslater,theblacklinesontheashcardlookmuchthicker.

Also in 2017, the website Migrants of the Mediterranean launched (Kerpius, 2017). It is a

projectledbymyfriendPamelaKerpius,whorsttravelledtoItalyinJuly2005tovisitmeasIwas

staying with my family. She has returned to Italy many times since then, exploring every corner of

the country. Once she reached Lampedusa in 2016, she was struck by the apparent divide between the

different forms of mobilities that meet on the small island: tourism and migration. Since then, she has

been travelling regularly from New York to Lampedusa, spending long stretches of time talking to

migrants who crossed the Mediterranean on overcrowded boats and rubber dinghies. She documents their

conversations on the website and through its various social media offshoots on Facebook, Instagram,

andTwitter.Theseprojectshelpmigrantsto gain an Internet footprint,and to counterofcial media

accounts that depict them as a horde of indistinguishable people moving through Italy. Migrants of the

Mediterranean focuses primarily on their harrowing journeys to reach Lampedusa.

In the 2018 Italian general election, Italy’s politics moved decidedly to the right. The current

government is openly hostile to migrants, with Matteo Salvini leading the charge against new arrivals.

After a summer spent shutting down ports (Borrelli, 2018), the newly-minted Minister of the Interior is,

at the time of writing, occupied with drafting a law that seeks to restructure Italy’s immigration system.

As the particularities of the law, which seeks to eliminate refugee claims and retract residency permits

already granted, begin to emerge in the national press, Salvini’s Twitter feed is adorned with the banner

“Italians First”—a campaign slogan that parrots the 2016 presidential election in the United States. In

this climate, I return to Migrants of the Mediterranean with an urgency I had not experienced before,

reminding myself that in my Edmonton chart, the migrants’ stories were the blank square below Italy,

their voyages an arrow hopping over the bottom line. In Pamela’s project, they are given a chance to

resisttheatteninglogicofthemediatedimage,andthustorespondtothepoliticsthataimtoexclude

themfrom the nationaldiscourse.Allowingmigrants to drawtheir own onlineashcard,or atleast

giving them a metaphorical Sharpie is a necessary, albeit desperate, act of resistance, until their Freesa

acquires legal status.

Everyday Geographies, Geographies Everyday 1042

The Al-Quds Rally in Toronto–Breaking Boundaries

photos and essay by Tamir Arviv

I took this picture (Fig. 12) on a sunny Saturday afternoon in late July 2014 during the Al-Quds

Day rally held outside the Ontario Legislative Building in downtown Toronto. The Al-Quds Day (Al-

Quds is the Arabic name for the city of Jerusalem) is an annual, international event initiated by the

Islamic Republic of Iran following its 1979 Revolution. It was created as an expression of solidarity

with the Palestinian people and exists in opposition to Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day in Hebrew),

an Israeli national holiday commemorating the establishment of Israeli control over the “Old City”

District in the aftermath of the June 1967 war. Al-Quds Day rallies are held across the Muslim world,

as well as in various cities in North America and Western Europe. In recent years, the Al-Quds Day

rally in Toronto has become a site of affective clashes between local pro-Palestinian groups calling

for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against the State of Israel, and local pro-Zionist groups

whose members are, for the most part, Jewish-Israeli immigrants to Canada.

The polarization is very visual and evident in the photograph, as is the ‘neutrality’ of the Canadian

police force and Canadian state standing in between the two poles. The emotionless expressions on the

policeofcers’faces(center)dramaticallycontrasttheovertexpressionsofangerofthepro-Palestine

protesters (left) and the pro-Israeli protesters (right) against each other. The picture also captures the

waysinwhichmaterialobjects,inthiscasenationalags,areappropriatedassymbolsthatgatherpeople

Figure 12: At the Al-Quds Day Rally.

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019, 18(4): 1025-1053 1043

Figure 13: My

personal and familial

journey of migration.

attwodifferentideologicalendsofthisconict:membersofthepro-ZionistgroupareholdingIsraeli

andCanadianags,whilepro-Palestine/BDSprotestersareholdingPalestinianags.Duringtherally,

the pro-Zionist/Israel protesters chanted slogans such as “Israel’s values are Canadian values”; “Israel:

where freedom and tolerance live”; and, “Support for Israel is support for Canada.” This group also

accused the pro-Palestine/BDS protesters of being sympathizers of radical Islamic terrorism. Dividing

the global political terrain along Orientalist cultural ‘civilizational’ lines (Said, 1978), between the

so-called ‘liberal West’ and the so-called ‘fundamental Islamic world’ (Huntington, 1996), the pro-

Israeli activists were able to stake their claims of belonging to both Israeli and Canadian societies,

thus assuming a role of defenders of ‘Western civilization’ in Canada. In contrast, member of the Pro-

Palestine/BDS groups chanted slogans that equated the State of Israel to ‘an Apartheid State’ and all

Israeli Jews to (white) settlers in the Middle East. These slogans, in turn, have allowed pro-Palestine/

BDS protesters to assume the role of anti-racist and anti-colonial human rights advocates.

As I watched this scene and captured it with my camera, I felt caught between these two

positions.Ontheonehand,theOrientalistlogicofthePro-Zionistprotestersdidnottwithmyhybrid

identity and racialized embodied experience in Israel and in Canada. On the other hand, the messages

circulating among members of the BDS group during the rally, which were framing the conict in

Israel/Palestine as an instance of colonization by fundamentally alien white (European) settlers, did not

resonate with me, either.

My diaspora identity and sense of belonging in Toronto is tied to my personal and familial

journey of migration. My family journey starts in Tripoli, Libya. Both of my parents were born there

during Italian occupation. Their families had lived there for countless generations; they moved to Israel

as part of the mass migration or displacement of Jews that took place in the Arab world between the

1940s and 1970s. They were young when Mussolini’s Fascists brought Nazi-inspired anti-Semitic laws

to Libya under the 1938 Manifesto della razza (Charter of Race). Following the liberation of Libya

fromItalianandGermaninuencein1942,myparentsandtheirextendedfamiliesfoundthemselves

attheheartofacountryandregion in intense ux.AsanewandexclusivelyArab national identity

gained traction, the Jews of Libya found themselves subjected to violence and attacks orchestrated by

members of nationalist groups. Like many Jews living in newly independent Arab countries including

Libya, Libyan Jews responded favourably to the solicitations of Zionist emissaries who promised a

better future in the newly formed State of Israel, and thus accepted to relocate.

My father arrived in Israel with an Aliya or immigrant movement of Libyan youth shortly after

World War II, and my mother arrived with her family in 1949. Most Jews of Middle Eastern and

North African origin know as Arab Jews or Mizrahim, including my parents and families, lost property,

passports, and their social standing within their societies of origin, arriving in Israel impoverished and

Everyday Geographies, Geographies Everyday 1044

destitute. From their emic perspectives, their arrival and resettlement in the “Land of Israel” was a

movement within a singular, familiar Middle Eastern space in which they were already unquestionably

indigenous (Shenhav, 2006).

 In their rst decades in Israel, they were dependent on the Ashkenazi-dominated (Jewish

European) Labour Zionist state’s institutions and policies relating to welfare, housing, and settlement.

Furthermore, in the new, European-oriented State of Israel, they were also forced to reject key elements

of their Mizrahi cultures and identities. Certainly, as Israeli citizens and Jews in a Jewish state, Mizrahim

haveenjoyed signicantprivileges vis-à-vis Palestinians.Yet,theyfound themselvessystematically

channeled to the socio-cultural, economic, and political margins of Israeli Jewish society (Shohat, 1988;

Shenhav, 2006; Chetrit, 2009).

I was born in Israel in 1979, and grew up in Or Yehuda, a small, working-class town, where most

of the population, like myself, was Mizrahi Jews. Consistent with many members of Mizrahi second

and third generation people, my experience of racialization - within the context of persistent social and

cultural oppression and marginalization of Mizrahi Jews in Israeli society—comes to combine with

a cross-generational transfer of loss of culture, language, identity, property, passports, and standings

inthe community(Yosef,2011,74).Atthesametime, ‘MiddleEastern’andArabicinuences were

always present during my upbringing in Or- Yehuda—more than the Western or European ones that are

normalized in Ashkenazi-dominated spaces, including elite Israeli university campuses, where, because

of my background, I often felt out of place. While my parents stopped speaking to me and my brothers

and sister in Arabic at home, they spoke Arabic with my grandparents. They maintained other aspects of

a distinctly Jewish-Libyan identity and culture at home, and in particular with respect to Libyan cuisine

and Jewish-Libyan religious rituals.

At the age of 30, I left Israel for Toronto in September 2009. During my encounters with non-

Israeli Jews and non-Jewish Canadians alike, I found myself facing curious questions about my ethnicity

and religion. I soon learned that as a dark-skinned, Mizrahi, Jewish, Israeli man living in Toronto, I was

expected to explain the ‘contradictions’ in my identity. To those who are curious, I explain that the Arab

and Mizrahi-hybrid cultures are inseparable parts of my Israeli diasporic identity in Toronto, and of my

Jewish identity. Israel is my homeland - but is intimately connected to my parent’s homeland in Libya,

and my presence in Canada.

My familial and personal journey of migration crosses racial, cultural, and political boundaries

that were represented by both pro-Zionist and pro-Palestinian protesters during the Al-Quds Day rally.

Obviously, the current situation for Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians are not comparable. The depth of

racial and colonial violence against the Palestinians prevalent in Israel/Palestine, as well as the agency

and complicity of Mizrahi Jews relating to the subjugation of the Palestinians in Israel/Palestine, is

undeniable (Shenhav, 2006). Yet, the historical circumstances of Mizrahi Jews, who have also lived

through colonialist, nationalist, as well as Zionist upheavals in the Middle East, complicate the dualisms

and binaries of native versus immigrant/settler. Indeed, the hybrid identities of these Jews considerably

challenge the Jew versus Arab dichotomy (Shohat, 2003). The tendency among Zionist and anti-Zionist

scholars and activists in North America to represent the politics in Israel/Palestine as cohesive, and

fundamentally a matter of religious, racial, and ethno-national bloc differences, as per the Al-Quds

Rally in Toronto, erases Mizrahi and Arab Jewish historical-geographies and elides features of their

ongoing struggles. A truly inclusive anti-colonial and anti-racist activism about Israel/Palestine and in

Canadamustembracehistorical-geographies,thespecicitiesofMizrahi concerns, and the contexts of

Palestinians and other marginalized groups in contemporary Israeli and Palestinian societies.

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019, 18(4): 1025-1053 1045

Contemplations on Mobility and (A)Political Existence:

An Attempt to Escape to Nature

photos and essay by Paolo Frascà

“The body must be regarded as a site of social, political, cultural, and geographical inscriptions,

production, or constitution. The body is not opposed to culture, a resistant throwback to a natural

past: it is itself a cultural, the cultural product.” (Grosz, 1994, 23, emphasis in original)

 Grosz’sinsightherelaysthefoundationformyreectiononhumanmobilityandtheimpossibility

of shedding political and material histories from one’s subjectivity. The critical meditations in this piece

explore the desire to “escape” from the city to a more natural landscape, as well as the disillusion that

such an escape can occasion the return to what Giorgio Agamben (1998) describes as “natural life”

(105), a life free of political existence.

In July of 2017, I wanted to escape the city of Toronto and from a few people in it. I booked

a “Mongolian-style yurt” in Mattawan, Ontario on the popular AirBnB website, rented a car from

Enterprise, grabbed some clothes, books, food, and my phone, and went. I brought Louis, a Chihuahua,

with me. While I did escape Toronto, I became tangled in networks of movement and exchange different

than those in the city. Renting property and a vehicle from multinational, multi-billion-dollar companies,

bringing items produced in different countries with me, and having my animal friend come along on the

trip all complicated my “escape” to “nature.” My own identities as a scholar, a gay man, an immigrant

to and citizen of Canada deeply shaped my four-hour overland trip, which was to be a “simple” and

Figure 14: July 2017 in Mattawan, Ontario.

Everyday Geographies, Geographies Everyday 1046

Figures 15 and 16: Pin location of

Mongolian-style Yurt and Ontario

First Nations Territories.

therapeutic venture into the woods. These complications condensed around three main issues: the (im)

possibility of a true escape from the social and political self; the implications of carrying objects and

animals originating in different parts of the world; the possibility of accepting and functioning amid the

troubled networks of modernity.

My personal and professional experiences with migration and marginalization have tuned me

intoissuesofcolonialism;IwascurioustondoutmoreaboutthespecicplaceIvisited.Ilearned

that the territory of Mattawan is situated on the colonized land of the Nipissing First Nation (Treaties:

Robinson-Huron #61, 1850 and Williams, 1923). The red pins on the maps below show where the

Mongolian-style yurt I rented is located (Fig. 15), with reference to the different Indigenous territories

of the region (Fig. 16). It was interesting and important to be aware of the political and geographical

history of Mattawan, but this meant that I could no longer see it as the bucolic destination I originally

envisioned. The land and resources all around me were imbued with a history, sometimes painful. My

presenceintheselandscapeswas,asIreected,anextensionofsettlercolonialism,andIexperienced

this as problematic. Here, I was not numbed by the overstimulation and confusion of the city— also

settledterritory—andthesereectionscouldtakeupmorespaceinmythinking.

The structure my small animal-friend and I would call “home” for the next few days had no

electricity, no cellular signal, no Internet, no running water. Perhaps, this would allow for an escape. I

hoped that being technologically disconnected would grant me a sense of freedom. I wondered whether

or not I could simply feel gratitude for this experience, without concentrating on the fact that this place,

in the middle of nowhere, was actually a node of history, and its silence, unlike the cacophony of the

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2019, 18(4): 1025-1053 1047

city, was waiting to be asked questions about all it had witnessed.

I took the photo (Fig. 14) above soon after my arrival. The photo makes palpable the intersections

of history and movement in which I was immersed. In the image, Louis the Chihuahua, is standing in

front of the property he had already marked as his. He shares the deck with two avocados (“ahuacatl”,

the original name of the fruit, means “testicle” in the Nahuatl language of the dog’s and fruit’s native

México) that I had rested there to ripen. Louis’ own ahuacatls are right above them—a coincidental

homage to the fruit’s etymology—as he safely guarded this Mongolian-style lodging. The photo was

taken with an Apple iPhone designed in California and assembled in China. I took the photo: a Southern

Italian whose not-so-pale skin reminds me that my genes have a diverse history, one that my citizenships

fail to represent.