By Om Prakash Dwivedi
Michael Ondaatje rightly asked a disturbing question, “Do you understand the sadness of geography?” What happens when the country of one’s birth becomes a life sentence? One may also ask why the cost of liveability is found only beyond the given human life for migrants and asylum seekers.
To restrict movement is to immobilise the future. It is a time in which the body itself becomes a burden and its colour a proverbial sin. One is thrown to a point of no return, to a country of life sentence, and to a destiny mired in perennial chaos and lurking threat. There is no departure then, only a future that is always already cancelled.
Words like dignity, human rights, living conditions, love, care, and future do not exist in the lives of many migrants and asylum seekers. “So, here you are, too foreign for home, too foreign for here. Never enough for both,” as the Nigerian poet Ijeoma Umebinyuo powerfully sums it up.
Perhaps the distance between the country in which one is born and the country that can feed and render a dignified life can only be covered through the distance between the mind and heart. Maybe that is the kind of lie in which migrants and asylum seekers can find an escape—or perhaps they can only pitch their tents in such imaginative spaces. Because in our real world, bodies and colour matter more than being human. It is a world torn asunder by the toxicity of whiteness and hegemonic forces, profoundly stoked with xenophobic ideas and practices.
To be a migrant, then, is to be in a state of perpetual denial and an approved condition of chaos. It is to dream of a place for the future from outside, which can never be claimed. It is to write a body for which the supply of ink has already been severed.
To be a migrant is, therefore, a praxis toward reckoning—a praxis of a disembodied life. How else does one see the spiralling surge of cataclysmic violence to which they remain subjected?
Australia deported a large number of asylum seekers to Nauru, a small island in the Pacific Ocean. Likewise, the European Union, since 2017, has spent a staggering €59 million to train the Libyan Coast Guard to prevent migration from Libya to Europe. The EU has also signed multiple deals with African and Middle Eastern countries to block asylum seekers from entering its borders.
In March 2024, the EU signed a similar deal with Mauritania, agreeing to pay €210 million to stop migrants’ movement into Europe. This eventually turned into a double-edged sword, for the amount was also used to strengthen authoritarianism and structure violence in the country by granting more power and resources to President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, who is yet to abolish slavery in Mauritania.
One must also not forget the deportations carried out under Trump’s regime on 15 March, when he invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, sending back more than two hundred alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.
Similarly, on 16 July 2025, Tricia McLaughlin, the US Department Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, announced the deportation of migrants to Eswatini, a small South African kingdom. These deportees were imprisoned upon arrival, but what further problematised this inhuman offshoring was the enthusiastic response from Prime Minister Russell Mmiso Dlamini, who declared the country open to receiving more deportees. Termed “foreign criminals”, the deportees became tools to instil public fear, allowing Dlamini to evade scrutiny.
According to a 2024 report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), “At least 8,938 people died on migration routes worldwide in 2024, making it the deadliest year on record.” Yet such figures cannot capture the horrors of reality.
Individual suffering can never be compressed into statistics. The personal loss is incalculable and incomprehensible to the public. To slaughter and degrade migrants from poor nations is the barefaced brutality of our brave new world.
This article was first published as “The Sadness of Human Geography” in The Times of India and is republished here with the kind permission of the author.
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