I am… my migration

This September, as academic activities resume, Josefa formulates an invitation, a question which many students will also ponder during their school year: "Who am I?"

When you agree to this introspection game, you also agree to look at others in order to try to discover yourself.

On this path that is challenging for oneself and for others, perhaps I could heed the path travelled by the one who might eventually help me answer my question: the exile, the displaced person who left a little of himself, of "his home", somewhere else.

If there is trust, then the exile, the asylum seeker, the refugee, this companion of mankind could be a person whose word, silence, gestures, and look, in short, whose presence allows me to delve, to move, in and around, this all-important question: "Who am I?".

Indeed, is it not mainly during times of separation, mourning or exile that my identity begins to waver and that suspicion and doubt set in about my own identity? Who am I "still"?

And thus, listening to those who, in the course of their migration, have had to hide, bury, transform, or adjust their identity, to continue on their path towards asylum, towards a future other than the one that was envisaged, programmed, or built, possibly by a few academic years.

Certainly, the revelation of this closeness, of this listening to the other, in his or her exile, with more or less joy, might make me think that "I am movement", that I am… migration.

But the challenge lies elsewhere: it is not about looking for the meaning of life, but for the meaning of "my life". And, in a way, the goal is not so much to get an answer, but to let myself cross and walk through paths which together will continue to construct or deconstruct, in me and around me, with me, sometimes without me or against me, perhaps even endangering my life.

I therefore become what I am; my identity is not linked to a particular label, instead I am alive and on the move, dependent on the encounters, paths, thresholds or borders which I happen, freely or under duress, to cross.

Together with some, with all, I am… my migration.

Gilbert