The Refugee Camp as Necrocity: The Jungle

In 2015, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, two British playwrights, established the Good Chance Theatre in the refugee and migrant camp known as the Jungle in Calais, 300 kilometres North of Paris. The name of the theatre, Good Chance, derives from a saying of the refugees and migrants in the camp: “Sometimes good chance, sometimes no chance” to make the crossing over the English Channel (The Jungle 36). The Jungle was located on a former landfill site East of Calais, which is at a fifty-kilometre distance to Dover in the UK. In October 2016, the camp was demolished. It is estimated that the Jungle housed about 8,000 inhabitants at that point.

In 2016, British journalist and food critic A. A. Gill visited the Jungle in order to write a review on the food from, as the article says, “A Refugee Camp Café.” An excerpt of this review introduces the published playtext of the migration play The Jungle. In his review of the café (and the food) in the refugee camp, Gill writes:

The desperate desire of everyone is that this is a temporary stop. A brief, cold and trying moment. But despite the best intentions, the Jungle is beginning to become a place, with churches and theatres and art and restaurants. It is germinating into that collective home. But then, isn’t this how all places once began? With refugees stopping at a river, a beach, a crossroads, and saying, we’ll just pause here for a bit. Put on the kettle, kill a chicken. (Qtd. 12)

In his review, Gill awarded the restaurant four out of five points for “Food” and four out of five points for “Atmosphere.” His description of the refugee camp calls to attention the origins of all human settlements and evokes the notion of the Jungle as a city in and of itself, as a collective home, even though it is not recognised as such. Derek, one of the volunteers in the play, likewise emphasises this aspect: “All the great cities. They all started the same way. It’s just a group of people, waiting by a river, the sea” (98). I want to consider the refugee camp as cityscape, as city-in-the-making, and, as such, as a performance space for theatre productions. However, I argue that the condition of the makeshift city of the refugee camp constitutes a necrocity, a city of nonbeing which denies the refugee or the migrant not only access to European space but also the status of being fully human – which is called to attention in the play. Furthermore, I will briefly discuss the play’s attempt at immersing its audience in the refugee necrocity, the Jungle.

The play is set in an Afghan café, similar to that visited by Gill. The spectators find themselves within the café as if they were customers, with part of the audience seated at tables which are part of the set design. Thus, the audience is immersed within the setting of the refugee camp and bears witness to its life before its imminent destruction and that of the community which it was holding, such as Ali from Kurdistan, Salar from Afghanistan, Helene from Eritrea, or Little Amal, the six-year-old refugee girl from Syria. The play introduces the refugee camp as a (necro)city, acknowledging the Jungle: “This is a city” (41). The Jungle is structured into different neighbourhoods, for the stateless, such as Kurdistan and Palestine, as well as for those with officially acknowledged nation states: Iran, Eritrea, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan (27). The residents of these neighbourhoods join in the administration of their city and name it “Zhangal,” a Pashto word meaning forest (27). The refugee camp is indeed a city in that it is the result of an organic process, an organic materialization of human beings – of people – making home. At one point in the play, Safi, a thirty-five-year-old man from Aleppo and once a student of English language and literature, addresses this aspect of the camp as place or home and asks:

When does a place become a place? By November in the Jungle I could walk from Sudan through Palestine and Syria, pop into a Pakistani café on Oxford Street near Egypt, buy new shoes from the marketplace, Belgian cigarettes from an Iraqi cornershop, through Somalia, hot naan from the Kurdish baker, passing dentists, Eritrea, distribution points, Kuwait, hairdressers and legal centres, turn right on to François Hollande Street, turn left on to David Cameron’s Avenue, stop at the sauna, catch a play in the theatre, service at the church, khutba in a mosque, before arriving at Salar’s restaurant in Afghanistan. When does a place become a home? (67)

Jansen points out that even though refugee camps may have originally been conceived as temporary spaces to shelter people (and separate them from the host societies), in practice these camps often exist for long periods of time, some even indefinitely. What needs to be emphasised is that life does not come to a standstill but continues in these camps: people create existences, build communities, and make home as the quote above illustrates. Many of the residents of the Jungle have lived there for many months, some even for years. For example, in the play, Mohammed and Helene state they have been in the camp for “eleven months” (14), Yasin has even “Been here since the beginning” (16). For them, their makeshift city, even though it is temporary, becomes their home, or rather, in the words of Balibar, “a home in which to live a life which is a waiting-to-live, a non-life” (83).

This negation of life that Balibar highlights renders the camp not only a makeshift city, but a necrocity, a city which allows life only in so far as it does not (directly) disallow it – in contrast to a (bio)city which actively supports life, for instance, by providing services and infrastructure. Hence, the refugee or the migrant inhabits the contradictory position of making home in an in-between space which negates their existence (as human), that is, the camp as necrocity. One quote by Safi in particular encapsulates the necrocity as exemplified in The Jungle: “Look around at the squalor, people shitting, burning plastic, asbestos in the sand, wet clothes with no chance to dry. We built because we had to. Everywhere, the sound of saws, hammers, work. In the absence of any help from the French state, we did it ourselves” (29). In the absence or refusal of biopower, camp-turned-(necro)city has been made home to its residents nonetheless, yet remains a place of negation of being.

Additionally, The Jungle touches on a number of issues, such as white saviourism, white guilt, and internalised assumptions of white supremacy, as expressed through the naive and patronising behaviour of the British volunteers. The five volunteers take over command, impose structures, and assign names to the informal city and its residents. For instance, in the play, the camp is renamed from “Zhangal,” the name chosen by the residents, to the “Jungle” by one of the white British volunteers. Another example is the following exchange between Sam, one of the volunteers, Helene, a refugee from Eritrea, and Safi, a refugee from Syria, exhibiting an utter lack of awareness and unchecked claim to authority and knowledge on the side of the volunteer:

SAM: I’ve weighted it. It is like an algorithm.

HELENE: Algorithm?

SAM: Sorry, it’s an English word –

SAFI: It’s an Arabic word, actually. (64)

Through its setting and theme, the play evokes the continuation of imperial and colonial domination and the outright and deliberate acts of white supremacy through the cynical behaviour of Fortress Europe to those seen as Other. The presence of and dialogues with the volunteers, on the other hand, expose more complex internalised notions of hegemonic whiteness. They show how these racist and colonial assumptions of superiority have been unconsciously and unquestioningly internalised even by those who are “well-meaning,” leading them to ignore life-experiences and the knowledge of others, especially vulnerable others. The play thus addresses what Steve Biko criticized in white liberals as speaking for the oppressed. In one of his seminal essays, Biko argues that white liberals with “their characteristic arrogance [assume] a ‘monopoly on intelligence and moral judgement’” (65–66). A case in point of this synthesis of white saviourism and assumed superiority can be found in the following scene, when Sam propounds his housing plan to the residents of the camp:

SAM: I am going to explain my methodology for distributing houses. I have considered many factors, of which nationality is one. Above all, we must be fair.

ALI: Where is Kurdistan?

SAM: It isn’t on there.

ALI: You don’t recognise State of Kurdistan?

SAM: No. I mean, yes. I am grouping it in this quadrant here with Iraq and Iran –

ALI: You are doing what? (62)

The blatant ignorance and simultaneous assumption of moral and intellectual authority, as exhibited by Sam, not only highlights the ignorance and (covert) racism of Europe and the white West but shows an “acute awareness” (Wallace 72) of the two writers, Robertson and Murphy, of their own privileged positionality and thus contaminated solidarity. Clare Wallace suggests that the position of the playwrights as “privileged mediators” (72) is made tangible in the play, yet that these incongruities are being taken up “in its sharp criticism of the failings and hypocrisies of Western responses” (72). Besides, colonialism and its ramifications are not only implied but directly addressed in the play, highlighting that many refugees want to come to the UK precisely because of British colonisation and what that entailed, such as its linguistic legacy. Helene, a twenty-eight-year-old woman from Eritrea, makes this clear when she states: “I didn’t claim asylum in Italy, where I landed, [. . .]. My cousin is in UK. I speak English. Everyone in Eritrea does, because UK used to run Eritrea!” (91).

Furthermore, the play evokes slavery, specifically the Middle Passage of transatlantic slavery. In the play, Mohammed, a thirty-five-year-old Sudanese man, describes how the boat about to cross the Mediterranean is organised: “Poor people go underneath. Below the sea level. In the hold” (80). As we know, this is not the first time that people from Africa have been made to cross water confined in the holds of ships. In The Long Emancipation, Rinaldo Walcott makes the point that the crossing of the Mediterranean Sea (as well as the English Channel) by asylum seekers and migrants is not “a new Middle Passage” (43), but in fact an extension of the Middle Passage into the present, articulating thus the ongoing-ness of the project of coloniality (43, 48). The Mediterranean Sea, the English Channel, or the Aegean Sea have become an extended Middle Passage due to the continued white supremacist ideologies of European nations, their leaders, and citizens which manifests in racist and brutal border regimes. These aquatic colonial frontiers that enclose Europe and have rendered it a gated continent (Carr, Fortress Europe) have led to its borders becoming necropolitical “death worlds,” which extends to the camps on the coasts of these waters, to the refugee cities-in-the-making, which I therefore call necrocities.

The Jungle, its origins, its production, and its afterlife offer multiple aspects for consideration in regard to the entanglements of city and performance. First, with its detailed descriptions of its neighbourhoods, streets, cafés, or shops – in short, of its cityscape – the play is an acknowledgement of the refugee camp as city-in-the-making, as place of community and home. As such a city, in addition to its mosques, churches, or distribution centres, the real-life Calais Jungle holds a performance space, the Good Chance Theatre as a physical space of creative expression, which makes art available and accessible for those who are usually excluded from precisely such biopolitical spaces. However, these life-affirming attributes stand in stark contrast to the life-negating conditions that render the refugee camp a necro-city, such as “Chemicals. Snakes. The filthy land, all the rubbish” (26), as Mohammed and Salar list in the play.

A second aspect is the play’s setup as immersive theatre experience, as it brings the audiences in different localities into the space of the refugee camp café in Calais. Yet, precisely because the camp is not just a city-in-the-making but a necrocity, it raises the question whether the immersion of a fairly privileged theatre audience (who possesses economic capital and the safety and mobility that European citizenship provides) into the camp constitutes “poverty porn.” There is a thin line between trying to raise (public) awareness for the precarious conditions of the necrocity and fetishizing, exploiting, and capitalising on those who inhabit it. In contrast to Emma Welton’s take on the performance, I argue that the setting of the play, the café, prevents the audience from being immersed in a way that suggests a position of “pretending refugee,” but instead is lead to understand themselves as guests being invited into the space of the Afghan café, similar to Gill quoted in the beginning of this section, which is a form of hospitality that additionally contributes to the understanding of the camp as city.

A further dimension arose after the Jungle was demolished and the Good Chance Theatre rebuilt the original Calais dome theatre in London in view of the UK Parliament for the festival Encampment, thus symbolically bringing the refugee camp as well as its story onto UK soil (whose government is providing gracious funds to France to control the borders and halt migratory movements), as well as occupying public space, claiming space, and holding public space in the centre of the European city.

Necropower and States of Exception

The refugee camp is a city-in-the-making precisely because it is not a temporary placement. While configured and designed as such, the camps become, more often than not, permanent settlements (Jansen; Krithari). Having states of exception become the norm is a common practice in Western modernity, as Giorgio Agamben most notably formulates (Spengler et al. 118). This method of normalising exceptional conditions allows institutions, such as nation states or international organisations (for example, the EU), to not comply with their own laws and to operate outside their rulebooks and regulations. Moreover, the use of the label “crisis” allows for further escalation and the implementation of even more severe violations, in particular in the context of what has been termed “refugee crisis.” Accordingly, Birgit Spengler et al. point out: “Attaching the label ‘crisis’ to refugees and migrants implicitly justifies the use of extraordinary measures that often include (increased) border militarisation and punitive measures against those seeking refuge” (121). To put it differently, the term crisis is deliberately employed to justify the reproduction of violent and racist colonial practices on the bodies of refugees and migrants on the borders as well as in the cities.

Borderscapes and refugee cityscapes become manifestations of an “ontological negation” (Sharpe 14). They become what Achille Mbembe calls death worlds, in which asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants are not only living on a border, but are becoming and being a border themselves. In these death worlds, people are immobilised in a condition between life and death, or rather, a condition of suspension of life. According to Mbembe, this politics of death – or necropolitics – describes “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead” (92). In The Jungle, Safi expresses this negated state of being or nonbeing with the following words: “I thought this was a place, but it’s not. It’s between places. It doesn’t exist. We’re in burzakh, purgatory, waiting for the Judgement [. . .]. Refugees, migrants, whatever we fucking are. But not people [. . .]. We’re between people” (105).

This notion ties in with what Frantz Fanon articulated in Black Skin, White Masks as the “zone-of-nonbeing” (xii) in the context of (French) colonisation. Similarly to Mbembe, Fanon describes a space of existence below or outside a zone of being which grants (biopolitical) social and civil rights. Even more, it means inhabiting a death climate, in Fanon’s words, “a bloody, pitiless atmosphere” (Wretched of the Earth 245), which denies people or groups of people access to the category of the human, rendering them not-enough human or nonhuman, thus creating a link to thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter and Walcott. Christina Sharpe refers to this state as being in the wake, that is, “to live in those no’s, to live in the no-space that the law is not bound to respect, to live in no citizenship” (16). These states of negated existence are ordered by concepts of citizenship and race established through the ongoing history of structural colonial violence.

Borders and refugee cities-in-the-making are such necropolitical zones-of-nonbeing. The English Channel, the Mediterranean Sea, the Balkan Route thus become regimes of ordering, which actively differentiate between individuals in terms of social class, nationality, ethnicity, and race. Balibar therefore speaks of “a dual regime for the circulation of individuals” (82) which discriminates between national and alien, “between those who ‘circulate capital’ and those ‘whom capital circulates’” (83). The argument has been made that the status of the migrant is that of the homo sacer (Agamben), being stripped down to bare life, a life “politicized through its very capacity to be killed” (Homo Sacer 89); in other words, death has neither value as constituting a criminal act (as in murder punishable by law), nor as sacrifice (death as being valuable spiritually), rendering the homo sacer the living dead. Accordingly, in their essay “The Dead are Coming,” Jenny Stümer argues that “the status of bare life assigned to refugees trying to cross into Europe reveals a life exposed to death not only in the sense of physical precarity but also as a form of being ‘already dead’ (Agamben 1998: 105) while living” (26). Even when having crossed the colonial frontier of the Mediterranean Sea or the English Channel and having entered the European enclosure, refugees and migrants inhabit the necrocity (the refugee camp, the detention centre), as the invisibilised living dead. This existence as living dead extends beyond the necrocity into the biopolitical cityscapes from which migrants and refugees continue to be actively excluded.

As noted earlier, the linkage between the migrant and the colonised (or the slave), and the interrelation between processes of colonisation, slavery, and racial capitalism, on the one hand, and migration movements and Europe’s necropolitical border- and cityscapes on the other highlights how, as Walcott argues, “The deaths of Africans in the Mediterranean and the continued harassment of Africans in major European cities are [. . .] in fact, the logical outcome of historical and contemporary policies and practices meant to take all life from them and only notice them as life insofar as it is a life that produces wealth for the West” (48). Gržinić and Aneta Stojnić therefore posit that we do not simply have a system of necropolitics (“let die”), but that this system “not only inflicts death, but makes profit from capitalizing on it” (24). This can be seen in the ways of the West regarding lives of non-Western people and People of Colour in the histories of slavery, colonialism, and continuing systems of (racial) oppression and exclusion. Hence, Gržinić and Stojnić refer to the contemporary social order as “neoliberal global (necro)capitalism” (23), a system of governmentality which hierarchically orders Black bodies but also white bodies of the working class – yet not in the same place. In necrocapitalism, they claim, “the ‘black’ bodies dispossessed by past colonialism and present coloniality, and the white bodies of a decapitated working class in today’s global capitalism take different places in the structure of power that forms in the shift from biopolitics to necropolitics” (28). The exclusion of the refugee and migrant as well as of the poor working class from accessing the biopolitical city can be seen in Anders Lustgarten’s Lampedusa.

Necrocitizenship and the City: Lampedusa

The play shows how necrocapitalism extends from the Black life-form (Walcott), including the racialised refugee or the migrant, to the poor and white working class. The play focusses on two characters: Stefano, a former fisherman at a sea without fish on the coast of Lampedusa in Italy, and Denise, a Chinese-British student in Leeds, who struggles to finance herself as a debt collector and to receive welfare payment for her chronically ill mother. In its two storylines, the play exposes the exploitation and complete disregard for the poor and working-class people as well as the emotional toll taken on those who live in the wake of the so-called migrant-refugee crisis: people like Stefano, who once was a fisherman, but was forced into what he calls “The job no-one else will take” (7), that is, fishing the bodies of refugees out of the water. As he says: “I always thought, always knew, I’d make my living at sea. But the fish are gone. The Med is dead. And my job is to fish out a very different harvest” (7). The play alternates between the two storylines, focussing in turn on Denise and on Stefano. Their parallel story threads align in that both characters experience what it means to live on the border between biopolitics and necropolitics and desperately try not to connect with those ordered into the Fanonian zone-of-nonbeing or completely cross over into Mbembe’s death worlds themselves. Both Stefano and Denise speak of being dissociated from those worse off than them. One must be “Dispassionate. Keep a professional distance” (7), Denise asserts, while Stefano declares that “You try to keep them at arm’s length. If you let them get close you never know what they might ask for” (13).

The turning point for Denise, who is accused of being a “traitor to the working class” (7), comes when she experiences an unexpected act of kindness by one of her clients. When Denise is overwhelmed by the demands of caring for her sick mother who keeps ringing her on the phone, Carolina, a Portuguese immigrant from whom Denise was supposed to collect a payment, “sits [Denise] down at her kitchen table and [they] talk. It’s the expression on her face. No agenda, just nice. A nice person” (17). Likewise, Stefano cannot help but befriend Modibo, an asylum seeker from Mali: “It’s been bloody good for me to be around him, actually. He’s been a real mate. / So I’ve decided to be a good mate back” (22). It is because of Modibo that Stefano learns to recognise the Other as human again and to understand the necropolitics of European borders:

He turns to me and, very quietly, he says that it’s deliberate. That our glorious leaders want the migrants to drown, as a deterrent, a warning to others. They want them to see TV footage with bloated bodies and the rotted faces of those who trod the watery way of death before them so they’ll hesitate before they set foot in one of those rickety little deathtraps.

And he says they do see – and they get in anyway. They know what the dangers are, but they keep coming and coming because, in his words, “if those men in their offices knew what we were running from, they’d know we will never ever stop.” (19)

In this scene, the play refers to a real-life tragedy that occurred on 12 October 2013 on the coast of Lampedusa, when 350 refugees died on a single day: “This morning, a migrant boat, unusually overloaded even by the standards of migrant boats, overturned almost within sight of Rabbit Beach. So far we are looking at north of 350 dead” (18). This event in the play is the crucial moment of recognition for Stefano, as the quote above shows.

In addition to the horrible number of deaths, this event is exceptionally noteworthy in the contemplation of necropower because of the question of citizenship and necrocitizenship (Gržinić). The Italian government and the EU granted hundreds of the dead migrants Italian citizenship after their bodies were recovered from the sea. The reason being that as Italians (and thus Europeans), the Italian government and the EU could bury their bodies on European soil rather than arrange costly repatriations to the countries of origin and make arrangements with the families of the deceased. The few migrants who survived the tragedy were, however, not given citizenship but instead prosecuted for illegally entering European territory. Accordingly, Gržinić posits that the only form of citizenship available to those pushed into the zone of nonbeing is a “necrocitizenship” (150), a citizenship granted upon death. Gržinić argues that “EU citizens live in necro-stained biocapitalism” (148), because there is a biopolitical citizenship for EU nation-state citizens and a necropolitical citizenship which is given to noncitizens (for example, refugees, asylum seekers, and sans-papiers) only on the condition of death (150).

Lampedusa explicitly addresses and calls out the calculated and deliberate drowning of human beings in the Mediterranean – so much so that it begs to ask the question whether Fortress Europe is committing crimes against humanity on its frontiers. The play exposes and sets this in relation to the likewise calculated and deliberate death of the poor and working class in the UK, as is shown by way of the example of Denise and her mother, who is not regarded as sick but as a “bed blocker” (24) in hospital, not able to work, but not qualifying for benefits either. Not profitable to the neoliberal order in any mode of being, Denise’s mother is denied access to the biopolitical city and to its services supporting life, such as the care that a hospital or the welfare system would provide, and instead positioned in a zone-of-nonbeing and cynically “let die.”

This necropolitical exposure to death of the refugee as well as the poor working class epitomises Agamben’s notion of bare life vs protected or valuable life. Judith Butler complements this dichotomy and argues: “those whose lives are not ‘regarded’ as potentially grievable, and hence valuable, are made to bear the burden of starvation, underemployment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and death” (25). And yet both Stefano and Denise receive glimpses of humanity through the experience of what it means to not just live adjacent to one another but for lives to actually touch, allowing them to re-member what has been dismembered.

While the play highlights the precarity and exploitation of the poor and/or white working class, especially exemplified in the neglect of Denise’s mother by the welfare state, it must be acknowledged that as an EU or a British citizen, one’s life is still supported by biopower, even if a corrupted one. Gržinić therefore emphasises that those with citizenship in the first capitalist world

are not under the direct threat of death. We have problems related to wages and discrimination, such as unequal possibilities in the job market, but we can still access state support and we are not evicted from our nation-states, even if we are criminals. Yet we do not face the direct threat of death. We EU citizens live inside the biopolitical global neoliberal capitalist regime. (149)

Migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers – the noncitizens, on the other hand, are exposed to the necropower of total abandonment which “makes die” (instead of “let die”), actively disavowing life to the point of death. As The Jungle and Lampedusa demonstrate, borders are regimes of ordering. Those regarded as not-human-enough who survive the crossing of the necropolitical borderscapes are placed in refugee necrocities or as necropolitical citizens excluded from accessing the biopolitical European metropoles, such as the town of Lampedusa or the city of Leeds. Lampedusa exposes the coexistence of the necropolitical and the biopolitical side by side in the same city and suggests what contact between both can look like.

Transgressing (B)order: The Walk

This leads me to another performance that helps us to remember the human in each other and the need to transgress all kinds of (b)orders. The Walk is an on-going performance of the journey of a ten-year-old Syrian refugee girl from Aleppo by the name of Little Amal, first introduced in The Jungle. Little Amal takes the form of a 3.5-metre-tall puppet, created by the South African Handspring Puppet Company which is based in Cape Town. In search of her mother, Little Amal goes on an 8,000-kilometre journey from Syria, through Turkey, to Greece and Italy, crossing Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, entering France, visiting the old port of Marseille in the South and the refugee camp the Jungle in Calais in the North until she eventually reaches the white cliffs of Dover, arriving in Folkestone after having crossed the English Channel. Since then, she has walked in Canterbury with the founders and participants of The Refugee Tales, in Krakow with Ukrainian refugees, and through the boroughs of New York City in the US.

While some people have thrown food and even stones at the puppet, many others have welcomed her, decided to walk with her, and accompany her on her journey. The travelling festival is freely accessible, thus allowing for theatre, for art, to be a shared, public, open-access, and participatory encounter. Little Amal interacts with the audience, shakes hands, dances, learns new words, explores the city; but, as any child her age would, she also falls over and hurts her knee, she gets lost, she is overtired, and has a tantrum (140). Yet Little Amal is an inanimate object and, as such, she has the prerogative of crossing borders legally where human beings cannot or are criminalised for it.

The body of Little Amal is manoeuvred by one puppeteer positioned inside the rib-like structure of the puppet’s torso, moving her on stilts and navigating her head and eye movement. Two further puppeteers next to or in front of the puppet control her arm and hand movements. What is most interesting, however, is that in the interactions with the puppet, there is a complete disregard, in the sense of an intentional overlooking, of the human inside its structure, the person navigating the body and the two people guiding its hands. Instead, the human is recognised in the puppet as it comes to life, transforming an object designated with the pronoun it into a feeling and thinking she. Indeed, the art of puppetry itself is a border-crossing language and craft, as it transitions from the inanimate to the perceived animate. As Basil Jones, one of the founders of the Handspring Puppet Company, emphasises, what makes a puppet different from other crafts is that “its main objective is to strive to live. [. . .] a puppet is a craft object which does not function – in a way does not exist – unless it is being animated by a puppeteer” (qtd. in Kohler, Jones, and Luther 345; emphasis added). Amir Nizar Zuabi, the artistic director of The Walk, vividly describes the transition of the puppet from being “an inanimate object which is furniture” to being alive as a full person with a story:

And that never ceases to amaze me because in the assembly, there is a moment where she stands up and we check that everything’s in place. And there’s always a moment where she takes a breath, or our puppeteers together take a breath. And a second after they took that breath – she’s alive. She’s no longer a very sophisticated armchair or piece of furniture. Suddenly, she’s a living creature with thoughts, with complexities, with wants, with fears. (Qtd. in Zomorodi and Mohtasham)

Breath, as Zuabi’s description shows, is essential for the puppet coming to life. The puppet must make the movement of breathing since breath is “the origin of all our movement; it is the source” (Kohler qtd. in Taylor 166). In addition to its physical quality, breathing has a “profound metaphorical power” because, as Jones elaborates, “This non-existent substance (air) that is passing through this mechanical being represents the very essence of life: the soul” (qtd. in Taylor 262). This crossing of the border from inanimate to animate, from object to subject is made possible not only through the active involvement of the puppeteers (who take the breath), but also through the engagement of the spectators who attribute subjectivity to the object as they identify with and project themselves onto the puppet. Jane Taylor argues that this impulse to confer human qualities onto nonhuman entities might be an imperative instinct of our species (28). Accordingly, the relationship with the audience begins when the puppet is perceived as breathing. Following the intrinsic human condition delineated by Taylor, the spectator projects subjectivity and agency onto this being that is perceived to be alive. In other words, the audience recognises themselves (as human) in the puppet as they make it live. Thus, ironically, it is the nonhuman form of Amal which allows for the most border-crossing identification.

Little Amal has taken the same path many refugees have taken before her in order to raise awareness for the dehumanising mechanics of border crossings and Europe’s vicious necrogeographies. In the interaction with the public, with individual audience members on the streets, Little Amal, who is aging from year to year (like a human), enables contact between those thriving on biopower and those whose lives are negated by necropower. Moreover, I argue that the communal, cross-border walk of the refugee child puppet allows us to recognize and remember our humanity through and precisely in an (over-sized) material object and paradoxically by disregarding the human inside. Thus, The Walk is an immersive theatre practice and a means to transcend border, politics, and languages and move towards involvement in a shared humanity. As South African theatre critic Adrienne Sichel argues: “As [the puppets] attempt to move and breathe as we do, they cross the barrier of the here and now and become metaphors for humanity” (qtd. in Taylor 170). By employing the necessary human condition to identify with and to attribute subjectivity to the inanimate – the puppet –, The Walk leads us to transgress the imaginary (b)order between “us” and “them” as it makes the audience recognize (and remember) the human in the refugee. In other words, the puppet Amal creates spaces for the necropolitical and the biopolitical citizen to touch and performatively interrelates cities and necrocities through walking.

To conclude, borders are highly constructed spaces, but that does not mean they are any less real. As Balibar points out, borders have a “world-configuring function” (79), yet they do not manufacture the same world for individuals belonging to different social or racial groups. These regimes of ordering constitute a “world apartheid” (82), creating necropolitical borderscapes and cityscapes for the rejected or dysselected Others. The seeping of necropower from borders into necrocities and biopolitical cities on the coasts of the UK or the ports of Italy is an indication of the continuation of the European project of coloniality and of the extension of the Middle Passage into the present. The Jungle and Lampedusa address and explicitly call out the colonial capitalist necropolitical planetary (b)order, this planetary apartheid which places and immobilises the Black life-form, the refugee, and the migrant as well as the poor and white working class in necrocities or as necropolitical citizens without access to the biopolitical city. Remarkably, it is an inanimate object – the giant puppet Little Amal – which helps us to re-member what has been dismembered, which makes us recognise the humanity in the bodies of refugees and migrants as well as in those of us thriving on biopower who live “inside the citadels of overdevelopment” (Gilroy 119). Through the planetary apartheid order, we live adjacent to one another but our lives do not touch. Theatre and art cross these lines, reinscribing the humanity into the construct of “refugee,” “migrant,” or “asylum seeker” that the hegemonic narratives, the laws, and the (necro)capitalist neoliberal order have taken, and allow us to merge the regimes of necropower and biopower, for people to claim space together, to hold space together, so that our lives actually touch. The performances discussed show that theatre is a revolutionary, rebellious practice to transgress racialised (b)order and heal contested borderscapes and cityscapes.