Learning to Look: Berger’s Lessons
In 1998, Charles fled Sierra Leone’s civil war for an uncertain present in Cairo. He hoped to eventually resettle in America or Europe. A few months after he arrived, Charles went for his ‘status determination’ interview at the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) where the officials eyed his carefully ironed...
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| Published in: | The Critical quarterly 2023-04, Vol.65 (1), p.5-21 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Request full text |
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| Summary: | In 1998, Charles fled Sierra Leone’s civil war for an uncertain present in Cairo. He hoped to eventually resettle in America or Europe. A few months after he arrived, Charles went for his ‘status determination’ interview at the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) where the officials eyed his carefully ironed shirt with suspicion. Charles was apparently too well-dressed to be in fear of his life. (He had wanted to make an impression.) Despite their doubts, the officials gave Charles his refugee card. Then he waited. By the time I met him, it had been four years. The future was in the hands of bureaucrats, and Charles lived life in the conditional tense. I was a twenty-year-old living in Cairo and struggling to give form to what I was witnessing—not only the intimate experiences of Charles and his friends, but the global forces that had rendered them unfree: the UN system that had barracked thousands of surplus men on the edge of Europe and the Egyptian labour market that exploited their refugee status and inability to work legally. For my trip to Cairo, I had packed books by Bruce Chatwin and other British travel writers. I ended up pulling out of my bag “A Seventh Man,” the work of the English novelist and critic John Berger, working with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr. Nothing else I have ever read has had quite the same intellectual electricity as my reading of that book, that summer, in that situation. “A Seventh Man” attempts to grasp the experience of male migrant workers in Europe during the 1970s. In Berger’s text, intimate evocations of subjective experience and descriptions of objective conditions constantly jostle up against each other without forming a whole. Statistics and quotations from Marx vie for space with descriptions of street corners at the end of long night shifts and photocopies of tram tickets. There are lists, polemical interventions, imaginary conversations, and the contents of a Turkish family’s cart. Mohr’s photographs, interspersed throughout the text, do not illustrate the book’s arguments or depict its characters but form part of a contrapuntal conversation, in which a sentence is often answered—or questioned—by a photograph. That summer, as I spent my days with Charles and his friends on the streets of Cairo, it felt to me like all of migrant life was contained in “A Seventh Man,” in glorious, messy contradiction: its injustices, but also its loves and delights. |
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| ISSN: | 0011-1562 1467-8705 |