By Anshif Ali
*Arc of the Journeyman: Afghan Migrants in England, by Nichola Khan, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2020, pp. 288, INR 2,434; ISBN-13: 978-1517909628
Years of war and political turmoil in Afghanistan have engendered a massive exodus of natives who were forced to flee the predicaments of violence, death and scarcity that transformed them into one of the world’s largest refugee groups. In different junctures of time, under different regimes, the Afghan population endured severe torture and consequentially millions had to seek asylum in countries like Pakistan, Iran and England. Despite a group that wrote one of the most poignant chapters in the history of displacement, the quotidian lives of Afghan migrants remain largely under-researched in the academia. This is further exacerbated by the literary and cultural productions of colonial ethnographers whose fixed gaze produces only stories of Anglo- Afghan relations narrated by travellers “who journeyed from the center of the British empire to its frontiers in Afghanistan” [p.12] and gets stuck in certain imperial binaries. These stereotypical projections and orientalist myths are consumed by many as reliable accounts due to the absence of a dependable alternative source. Nichola Khan’s Arc of the Journeyman, an extensive ethnographic study based in Sussex, London and Peshawar, fills this lacuna in narrating Afghan migrants’ lives and offers a humane portrayal of their struggles and survival in a foreign country. The fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2017, along with its effective employment of social anthropology,
* Anshif Ali, Research Fellow, Jamia Madeenathunnoor, Calicut, Kerala, India.
Email: [email protected] Refugee Watch, 60, December 2022.
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mobilities research, the historiography of Anglo-Afghan relations, and the anthropology of migration from Afghanistan in research, takes the Pakhtun migrant taxi drivers as the core interlocutors. It also employs other qualitative methods like life-history work, dream sharing and historical, literary, poetic and imaginative research. Revealing the wider global networks created by the local circuits of taxi drivers, this book distinguishes itself in terms of being the first full-scale ethnography of Afghans in Britain.
The first chapter of the book, predicated on some of the anthropological writings on mobility, offers a fresh and unsettling depiction of the local and global forms of Afghan migration and attaches more importance to movement rather than the destination. Set in Sussex, it discusses the mobility and labour of the taxi drivers which, in a broader transnational context, is interconnected with their cultural practices and kinship relations.
The taxi drivers began their journey after claiming asylum in the 1990s and 2000s as young men who, as directed mainly by their fathers who pay for their passage, were sent out to remit their families back in Afghanistan. Towards 2017, there were 150 men working as drivers in different sectors. The migratory process of these drivers, along with securing the visas or citizenship, normally follows an upgradation from illegal to low-paid workers, to citizens and hackney-carriage license holders. This upward mobility progressing normally up to gaining the capacity to settle one’s family may take up to 10 years and entails considerable physical and mental exertion. The licensing process that includes memorising places and learning English often becomes a vexation for those who are ill trained in the language. Drivers encounter inequalities in terms of income and experience, which also are the bearers of critical discrepancies in matters related to citizenship, ethnic difference, class consciousness and social divisions [p.63]. Khan juxtaposes her inferences regarding the Afghan taxi drivers with prominent literature in the field which throws light on the stratifications among the driving mobility in different places like China, Vietnam and South Asia, at different times in history, and compares it with the former’s customary and political practices.
Khan devotes the major part of Chapter One to delineate the effects remittance brings to those who send and receive the money. The major motive behind families sending their sons off to faraway lands is their expectations that the latter can maintain the financial stability of the household back in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which helps to mould their lives amidst the woes created by war and deprivation. This challenges the notion of freedom and individual mobility enjoyed by migrants in the destinations whereby they are forever burdened with the pure obligation to elder kinsmen and never receive any tangible returns. Remittance is a form of economic, familial and cultural activities which possesses material and non-material values. The former encompasses the values like control, familial loyalty, guilt, frustration and despair, and the latter the vehicles, gadgets and other goods consumed by the family and relatives. Not all migrants can remit the money their family demands and they will need to exert extra hardship to meet their responsibility. Failures in remittance may bring shame and free the father from his duties to the son’s wife and children. Transferring the remittance is
Book Review 125 often performed using the informal economy and hawaldars play a critical role in it. Remittance, thus, becomes an active force in creating a globally networked economic force that the taxi circuit in a limited locality makes possible. Often taxi drivers encounter painful depression and undergo other psychological conditions as the work pressure crumbles them even though they could only remit less. The accumulation of debt, sleep deprivation and a hopeless attitude towards life deteriorates their existence and brings forth suicidal tendencies. As Khan observes, the complex and dynamic stories of drivers “problematize schematic mappings of Afghan migration, revealing lines that do not necessarily follow prescribed directions, and circles that do not return people to the place they started” [p.76].
Calling attention to the Pakistan side of the transnational context of Pashtun migrants, Chapter Two takes the chakar (a pleasure trip undertaken mainly by male friends which includes food and other leisure) as an analytical lens to explore mobility in a broader theoretical fashion. The Afghan migrants, who return to visit their families, engage in chakar and create the space of liminality which involves an interplay between “anti-structure and emerging structure”. It dissolves existing order and formulates a new one, but only in an uncertain way that the return to the starting point is expected anytime. Participants are capable of influencing the social hierarchies of power and achieving moments of freedom, though permanent, from rules and everyday obligations amidst oppressive migrant realities. Chakar determines a migrant’s position among his community as it involves the exhibition of one’s status, masculinity, wealth and generosity through commensality and remittance. The food prepared for the picnic, as it is indicative of one’s piety and hospitality, is important in this. These visits also constitute the development of migrants’ transnational identities.
The third chapter, which I personally found most interesting, explores the immobility of migrants, that is caused by their failure to achieve the goals of stability and upward mobility, through its use of three interlocutionary approaches: analysis of Khapgan (depression), doing four life- history interviews and interpretation of five dreams of one interlocutor. The necessity of remittance and sustaining a successful life will not be proportionate to everyone’s capabilities. Depressed by this carceral burden, some wish for “not moving” by resorting to sleep or bringing an end to life.
The labourers are often tortured by hopelessness, worry, frustration, boredom, a desire not to think and an inability to move or work and this situation creates a sense of not belonging, of being unreal or a kind of estrangement in them [pp. 131-132]. Khan understands these conditions by applying dominant anthropological theories to the ethnographic context of the migrant population in Sussex, and also through subclinical and psychiatric methods. The immobility they achieve while sleeping and their dreams that employ the culturally influenced symbols and imagery, which reveal their unnarrated woes and sufferings, are well researched by the author.
The fourth chapter consists of a number of storied "fragments" from everyday life that Khan collected during her fieldwork in Sussex, London and Peshawar. They are helpful in developing an interconnected narrative of
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"movement and migration, food and water, and terrestrial and aquatic crossings" [p.158]. Afghan migrants perform three types of interrelated crossings: as refugees fleeing to Pakistan from the war in Afghanistan, as British asylum seekers traversing land and sea, and as refugees to one’s own land during the repatriation from Pakistan. Migrants, while in transit and after reaching a destination, have to grapple with smugglers, asylum bureaucracies, border policies, deportation and many mortal threats. Khan’s is a humane depiction of the marginal transnational lives designed by global inequalities, fractures and liminality. Engaging with the work of Frederick Barth, Chapter Five is about Afghan Pashtun community organisations in Sussex. It narrates the extensive history and politics of Gulzai and Shinzada groups, two divisions of the city’s Pashtuns organised around two families and deeply delves into the complexities concerning the collective mobilisation and immobility in the migrant cityscape.
This book is an outcome of Nichola Khan’s daring effort to put forth an alternative portrayal of the lives of the Afghan population as a moving and contingent force against the stereotypical colonial narrations of Pashtun traditionalism and obscurantism. It presents migration as an ongoing process and observes mobility as the factor shaping the migrant subjectivities, thereby challenging the hegemonic representations. This book is a call for appreciating the migrant labourers' struggles while wrestling with life and sympathising with their sufferings.