Autobiographic Reflections on Loss, Longing, and Recovery

Guest post by Hyab Teklehaimanot Yohannes. Hyab is a Lecturer and Researcher in Forced Migration and Decolonial Education with the UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages, and Arts at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Hyab is on Bluesky @hyabyohnnes.bsky.social. 

This is the fourth post from a series that summarises individual chapters from Handbook on Border Criminology, edited by Mary Bosworth, Katja Franko, Maggy Lee and Rimple Mehta and published by Edward Algar. 

I was born in Eritrea a few years before its independence in May 1991, a moment I remember vividly despite my young age. The end of colonialism brought immense loss; we lost relatives, herds, lands, and livelihoods. On Independence Day, I was wounded by a bullet that penetrated my abdomen, leaving a physical scar. Even in excruciating pain, independence felt like breathing for the first time. However, while we initially felt elated, that joy was short-lived. By 1998, a war with Ethiopia erupted, leading to more losses, including the deaths of my three cousins. The war ended in 2000, but the toll was devastating. Eritrea became a carceral state, with the government indefinitely suspending elections and introducing mandatory national service, creating an environment where dissent was criminalised. State violence became the norm, and expressing dissatisfaction led to severe repercussions. Ultimately, the unbearable violence and lack of freedom compelled me to flee to Sudan. 

My chapter in the book narrates my fragmented journey to safety, reflecting disorientation, incompleteness, and suffering. Theoretically, it draws on decolonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe to challenge Eurocentric episteme and explore new ways of being. I trace new fields of resistance, as well as praxes that invite the silenced and erased to emerge. The foregrounding of these lived experiences aims to reveal and subvert structures of violence.

Throughout my journey, I encountered violent regimes of (b)ordering that deprived me and others of safe refuge. Each transition – from sneaking through borders to languishing in a camp, being held hostage in the desert, and facing dehumanisation in the asylum system – represent a relentless cycle of violence. Crossing multiple borders revealed how human differences are exploited to control and capture racialised bodies. I witnessed how these differences demarcate the relationship of the border to the body, selectively capturing racialised bodies in violent spatialities. In the camp, I experienced and witnessed refugees trapped in a state of indefinite waiting, stripped of their dignity. The camp perpetuates dehumanisation in a state of impoverishment and solitude. Humanitarian narratives often obscure the inhumanity and banality of coloniality within humanitarianism. In the desert, everything seemed dark. We were caught between fearing life and death, neither appearing less than the other. Refugee death elicited no moral outrage, as victims were deemed ungrievable. In cities like Khartoum, life was marred by police exploitation and kidnapping. From Khartoum, I was kidnapped and transported to Egypt. Three years later, I was resettled in the UK. Even there, I felt lost within structures of coloniality. I grappled with the weight of my experiences and the struggle of being a racialised person in a foreign land.

My story reflects shared experiences of many racialised refugees caught in violent (b)ordering systems, illustrating a condition I call ‘near-life’, where existence teeters between life and death. Reflecting on this condition, the chapter centres on themes of loss, longing, and recovery. 

The first loss, the loss of subjectivity, emerges when refugees are stripped of their rootedness in human time and space. Colonial political imaginaries and systems of coloniality and raciality cast refugees’ subjectivity as subhuman, unworthy of political recognition. In Fanonian terms, refugee subjectivity is relegated to that of the damné or, as Maldonado-Torres puts it, ‘an embodied subject who is pinned down in hell in various ways including by virtue of how it appears’. 

The second loss is dignity, undermining the essence of humanity. My body bears wounds that remain unhealed, with no redress for my suffering. Living with these wounds, I am trapped in a cycle of visceral pain. Processing such pain is difficult when it is perpetuated by enduring structures of coloniality.

The third loss, the loss of the body, is even more challenging. The body is a sanctuary of language, knowledge, and life – a Home without geography. When violated by violent borders, it is no longer Home or a body. My body was possessed and enslaved by traffickers, stripped of human qualities and agency by asylum processes. Later, it was reduced to a mere border, subject to state violence and technologies. The body is increasingly deployed as a strategy of (b)ordering by the state alongside military and smart technologies.

I do not want to dwell on longing, as it often distracts me. Reflecting on my past, I find nothing to long for but unfinished beginnings. I yearned to hold my parents’ hands before they passed, but that was not possible. I wish to locate where my umbilical cord is buried; for now, that remains an unattainable dream. In my life as a refugee, I long only for survival alongside friends, some of whom did not survive. Reflecting on the present, I feel overwhelmed by a world deaf to the cries of thousands of bodies in pain, including that of children. Imagining the future brings a haze of uncertainty.

In the chapter, I pose several open questions about ‘crime’ and ‘criminology.’ What lies beneath the near-life conditions I highlighted? What sort of life is ours if it can be rendered perishable? What ‘crime’ occurs when life itself is deemed perishable? Who bears responsibility for such a crime? The answers do not lie in law, criminal justice institutions, or human rights discourses; all these are structures of coloniality rooted in ‘pseudo-humanism’ that are, Aimé Césaire described as ‘narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist’. Recovering the essence of life lies in one’s perpetual fragility and ability to find oneself amidst loss. Existence resides in the ruins of coloniality, and within decoloniality lies a seed of life, thought, and recovery.

Rooted in the possibilities of decolonial recovery, I invite readers to imagine a theory of transition from the violability of coloniality to non-exclusive humanity. When we understand that the ‘criminal’ is coloniality and the ‘crime’ is its perpetuation, we can work towards destituting it. I emphasise the onto-epistemologic significance of the cry, prayer, poetry, music, and experiences of joy, love, and rage to challenge coloniality. We must consider these fundamental categories to envision a non-exclusive, non-racial, non-binary, and decolonial humanity that recognises plurality and relationality.

In closing, I stress that I am not defined by my wounded body nor limited by my undesirable skin. Instead, I expose the sensibilities of a wounded person, imagining life in the ruins of coloniality. I have revealed a lost body trying to find its essence. I invite readers to engage with the chapter with care for the fragility of all lives and the fading possibility of recovery from coloniality’s suffocation. It is my hope that this chapter will stir debates on forms of knowing and being that open space for decentring, unlearning, and unliving the death worlds created by coloniality.