[LINK] "A day out in Calais"

[rfmcdonald]

Hugh Brody's essay at Open Democracy describes, from the perspective of an anthropologist, the infamous refugee encampment in Calais.

So many of the worst forces of this moment in history converge on that few acres of ground that is known as The Jungle, a piece of Europe where loss and grief are concentrated. A patch of land that brings shame on every level of British and French governance.

I have worked in some of the worst slums and resettlement sites in India, and in the poorest of southern Africa’s shanty towns, but I had never encountered a place as grim and soul-destroying as the sprawl of tents, shacks, squalor and boredom that defines the Jungle. This is a society outside society; a combination of anarchy and dispossession. There are no regulations, no civil authority, that can be seen. Just the French police waiting for riots to suppress. There is nothing to do for the 5,000 people who are stuck there other than attempt to deal with the squalor and find the bare minimum of things to meet their needs; and there is nowhere to go except the ever more hazardous attempt to break through the fences and find some way of hitching a hidden and dangerous ride across the channel. This is both dire poverty and entrapment. It is achieved by a complex of cruel indifference.

We walked along the Jungle’s streets and tracks, some just passable for a car, many now deep in mud and pools of water. A truck had arrived to pump out the small row of portaloos that serves as the community toilets (no wonder there are human faeces dotted around in the few patches of grass and bushes that remain). The stench was unbearable – even the hardened residents were pulling the edge of a shirt or sweater to cover their faces. There were lines of men at the short rows of stand-pipes where a thin supply of cold water is available for open-air, public washing. There were groups of men standing together, as if waiting for something to do or something to happen. Some women and children were gathering at a small area reserved for them, to meet one another without the problem of men, and to collect things that had been donated. The conditions in which many of the women have to live are grotesque: hidden away even from the diminished freedom of a camp, living in fear, trapped within the trap. When we were there the population was made up of 4,000 men, and just 400 women. No one was sure how many children are there, but we saw a few who ran around chucking pebbles at one another, finding some way to play.

Yet this society outside society has grown, as all human systems will, to meet some of the people’s needs. Made from whatever building materials can be found there are some restaurants, a bar, a church, mosques, a minimal library and even an improvised hamam, a steam-bath. Migrants who have been stuck there long enough to give up hope of getting anywhere else somehow manage to build the starting-point of an economy. Reinforcing the feeling that this is indeed a place where many are stuck.