Human Waste and the Border: A Vignette

Abstract

Populations marked for disposability who are deemed to have no place in the modern, including the Indigenous everywhere and all who stand in the way of the progress of capital accumulation, are always on their way to becoming waste, their communities targeted for destruction. Disposability is a racial condition, the mark of sub-humanity. Forced to flee, those who are targeted find themselves travelling through zones over which a diffused terror reigns, zones we condense to the word “border”. Notably, destruction takes place in the multiple legal gray zones of the border. Canadian detention centers in this account, for instance, can be an immigration holding center, a provincial jail, or a hospital. In each space, the legal regime that is in operation is anomalous. In this article, discussing the case of a Roma asylum seeker from the Czech Republic, Jan Szamko, I make the argument that the destruction of bodies in the detention center is evident in the speeding up of the processes of biodegradation of the refugee’s body and in the casual expectation of a body’s decline. Guards are able to ignore the groans and extreme deterioration of the body through ideas about the duplicitous refugee who is merely faking. Significantly, medical care is not absent but instead crucial to biodegradation, scripting the cries and moans, and the feces, as something we can do nothing about, something that merely reveals a mind broken by its own duplicity. The inquest picks up on the narrative thread, urging improvement in communication but accepting nonetheless that a body that has reached this state of biodegradation has done so of its own accord. Szamko’s story shows the history of authorized violence against the Roma, a destruction accomplished by a transnational alliance between states that are the origin point of the violence and those states, such as Canada, to which the Roma flee. The relentlessness of the violence notwithstanding, disposable people never stop resisting their condition; their practices of resistance are a reminder to attend to what came before death.