Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature: Transnational Narratives from Joyce to Bolaño by Barbern Reinares Laura

Author:Barbern Reinares, Laura
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-66792-6
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

5

Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail and the Law

Stories about cops chasing immigrants.

Nothing shocking, really, people upset

because they were out of work, etc.

These are the sad stories I have to tell you.

Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

As if disclosing before a stubbornly incredulous audience that the emperor has no clothes, in his analysis of the current immigration situation in Europe, the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk observes that “the poor, unemployed and undefended of Asia and Africa who are looking for new places to live and work cannot be kept out of Europe indefinitely. Higher walls, tougher visa restrictions and ships patrolling borders in increasing numbers will only postpone the day of reckoning” (“The Souring of Turkey’s European Dream”). Because of the current map of social exclusion, transnational migration of third-world populations to the global North has long ceased to be a phenomenon to be discouraged by Western governments to become instead an inevitable reality that the developed world must accept and address. For millions, migration is now a matter of life or death. The truth is that the existing unequal distribution of wealth has pushed vulnerable populations to abandon their homelands in search of survival where they can access some means of sustenance, even under dangerous exploitation.

As analyzed in the previous chapter through the case of India, decolonization, which initially presented itself as the panacea for economic and cultural growth, proved to be a utopian dream once countries were left on their own after years of mismanagement and exploitation. Coinciding with Frantz Fanon’s early diagnosis, so-called emerging countries have attempted to resurrect their forgotten pre-colonial cultures and generate competitive economies with the help of institutions supposedly created to aid in their “development” (the IMF, the WTO, the World Bank), yet it is clear that their structural adjustment plans have only impoverished vulnerable populations more, while the local elites enjoy benefits akin to the foreign ruling class during colonial times.1

The decades after decolonization have witnessed the economic meltdown of former colonies because these countries have become utterly indebted and are now subjected to the demands of global finance capital, the latest (more sanitized) form of colonization. Haiti, for example, the first Latin American country to achieve independence, proves that early freedom does not translate into earlier recovery; in fact, Haiti’s situation is extremely dire. In Africa, Ghana and Nigeria (the countries analyzed in this chapter) fall into a similar pattern.2 What the former colonies regrettably share is the ghost of utter debt together with an increasing chasm between rich and poor, so that migrating to the West has now replaced the old independence dream: for many, the global North has become the Promised Land. A novel element, however, is that those migrating to the West encompass an ever-increasing number of women, many of whom are being trafficked.

Western countries’ response to the influx of people from those previously economically exploited societies has typically been one of xenophobia and exclusion, with immigrants from poor countries constructed as a problem. Despite the much-needed

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.