Bureaucracy, Emigration & Broken Lives — A Narrow Gate

Kristin Ferebee

A FEW MONTHS before I traveled to the Spanish town of Portbou, my friend Rashid confessed that he wanted to kill himself.

Rashid had been my student at the American University of Afghanistan when I lived and worked in Kabul. He had stood out immediately in the classroom on account of his exceptional linguistic gifts — I often remarked that he could rattle off complexities of English grammar that I, with my PhD. in English, would have to think hard about — and because of his exceptional graciousness.

He was a gentle man and a genteel one, even by Afghan standards of politeness. He was easy to talk to. I liked him a lot.

After the fall of the Afghan government during the U.S.-coalition withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, Rashid reached out to me.

His sister, a British resident, and her two daughters, who were British citizens, had been trapped in Kabul by the Taliban’s speedy ascent and were struggling to escape. The British government had promised them evacuation but, in the wake of the Hamid Karzai International Airport bombing that month, had ceased communication with them and seemed to have no interest in their case.

(It would later emerge, via a Foreign & Commonwealth Office whistleblower, that the British evacuation of Kabul had been marked by a state of almost total dysfunction, overseen by a minister who spent much of the lead-up on holiday and a staff who did not speak Afghan languages and could not operate the computer systems being used.)

There were, at that time, no commercial flights out of Afghanistan, but it was too dangerous for the family to stay in Kabul. Rashid had decided to help them cross the land border to Pakistan and try to board a commercial flight there.

Perilous Crossing

At the time, I was working with other volunteers to try to coordinate rescue efforts for U.S. allies. I told Rashid what I knew: that it was difficult, even with valid visas, for Afghans to cross into Pakistan, and whether or not you would be admitted largely depended on the temperament of the border guard, not to mention the size of the bribe that you could afford to pay.

This turned out to be true: the first time that Rashid and his family tried to cross, Pakistani border guards slapped and humiliated Rashid in front of his nieces before turning the family away. The second time, the family were luckier: they reached Islamabad, and I was able to help raise the more than $1000 required for Rashid’s sister and her children to travel to the UK.

But the effects of the experience lingered. I talked to one of Rashid’s nieces, later, in England. Her mother was so paralyzed by anxiety that she could not leave the house; the other daughter was constantly sick, for reasons that no one seemed able to diagnose.

Rashid himself wrote to me, dwelling on the shame he had felt when the border guards hit him. In Islamabad, where he shared a single room with four other Afghan refugees, he developed terrible stomach ulcers for which he could not afford medication.

He briefly tutored another refugee family in English, but he was not legally allowed to work. He was being supported by donations from the aid community, but as the West lost interest in Afghanistan, these became fewer and fewer.

Visa Rejection

In 2022, Rashid was accepted to an American university with a scholarship. But when he applied for a U.S. student visa, he was rejected. “You have not demonstrated,” the rejection letter read, “that you have the ties that will compel you to return to your home country after your travel to the United States.”

Rashid’s father had been trained in the United States to work for an American government agency that operated counter to the current government of Afghanistan, and Rashid himself had attended a USAID-funded university whose campus the Taliban had targeted in 2016. Under the Taliban, their family lived in terror.

It is difficult to imagine, under these circumstances, what evidence Rashid could have provided that would have convincingly demonstrated an intent to return.

We had heard that student visas were more likely to be granted in a different Pakistani consulate, so Rashid journeyed there. But there, too, he was rejected — this second rejection all but ensuring that he would never be granted a U.S. visa.

Slowly, it became clear to him that the future was a foreclosed destination. He was technically entitled to Priority-1 (P1) refugee resettlement in the United States, but Pakistan was failing to process these resettlement claims, and the only other country that would readily issue visas to Afghans was Iran.

The longer he stayed in Pakistan, the more he risked deportation back to Afghanistan. It was around this time that he started wanting to die.

Recalling Walter Benjamin

Portbou, a Mediterranean resort town located just past the border between Spain and France, is known primarily for two things: its spectacular beaches and the suicide of the philosopher Walter Benjamin.

On September 25, 1940, on the upper floor of a rust-colored slice of building in the center of the town, Benjamin swallowed an overdose of the morphine tablets that he had been prescribed for a heart condition. He was 48 years old. He died later that night.

These days, tourists can walk the same route that Benjamin took when he came to Portbou on foot over the Pyrenees, fleeing Nazi-occupied France. When I visited on an excursion from an academic conference at the Universidad de Alcalá, I found the trail signposted and scenic. The vegetation is dusty, pale green, peninsular; at many points, you can see the crawling sea.

The cemetery where Benjamin is buried, on the far side of Portbou, is similarly lovely. Hannah Arendt said of it that it was “one of the most beautiful spots I have ever seen in my life.”

Benjamin had hoped to reach Portugal and depart thence to the United States, which had issued him an entry visa. He had transit visas for both Portugal and Spain, but could not obtain exit paperwork from France and so had crossed the border illegally. The Spanish border police informed him that he would therefore be deported to France the following morning, where the Nazi-allied Vichy government would detain him.

He had been interned once already in the Versuche prison camp, near Paris. In 1942 his brother would die in Mauthausen, and had Benjamin been deported from Portbou, it is likely that this would have been his fate.

Since 1994, there has been a memorial to Benjamin in Portbou: an immense piece of art by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan. Or, rather, it is a memorial inspired by Benjamin and dedicated “to the memory of the anonymous,” since as Benjamin wrote, “[t]o honor the memory of anonymous human beings is harder than honoring the memory of famous ones.”

The memorial is set into the side of a cliff and takes the form of a narrow staircase descending towards the sea — one which the climber can never actually exit, since the last steps are barred by a pane of impenetrable glass.

The Torture of Idris

In August 2021, I had reconnected with my former student Idris, who was desperately trying to secure evacuation for his family.

Previously, I had known Idris mostly as a charming class clown with a habit of inventing ever-more-outrageous excuses for late assignments. (Once, memorably, he had tried to convince me that the Taliban had kidnapped his uncle during finals week.)

In 2021, he texted me a jittery narration of his attempts to enter Hamid Karzai International Airport. In the last days of the U.S. evacuation it was controlled by the Taliban and only unpredictably accessible. At one point, he was beaten by Taliban guards at a checkpoint. He sent me a photo of his back and shoulders, swelling up with black contusions.

I didn’t know how to respond. Why did you send me this? I wanted to ask. I was not yet familiar then with what I would come to recognize as the urgent need for someone, anyone, to bear witness.

It was as though he was not sure if his suffering was a form of madness — as though he questioned if he might have been an ant that dreamt it was a man, and only with my acknowledgement did the confirmation come: No, you’re not crazy. You are human. You are human; you should not be suffering like this.

Idris and his family were not evacuated. For the next year and a half, they held out hope of some kind of rescue, but it became increasingly clear that this hope was ill-founded. His father had worked for a large international NGO, but it appeared that this did not entitle him to any kind of aid or evacuation.

Idris’s university was evacuating students from Kabul in small, limited bursts, but the Taliban’s increasingly grim policies against women had driven them to prioritize the evacuation of girls.

Like Rashid, Idris was qualified for U.S. P1 refugee resettlement through the university, but in order to start this process he would have had to travel to a country that was processing this paperwork. The only two countries that semi-reliably issued visas to Afghans, Iran and Pakistan, were therefore not options.

Idris was effectively trapped in a prison without walls or a name; or rather, a prison whose transparent walls were the global security state’s lines of partition and containment.

And the truth was that, even if Idris had reached a country where his P1 paperwork could be processed, he would have faced a dehumanizing, multi-year wait.

I had seen this already: Nasrat, another former student of mine, had been evacuated by an NGO to the United Arab Emirates — a country where his P1 application could be processed — in late 2021. I talked to him a year and a half later. He was still in Abu Dhabi’s International Humanitarian City, a bleak facility where refugees lived like inmates.

The NGO that had evacuated Nasrat had stopped returning his emails. No one who worked at the refugee center seemed to have any information about his case.

In August 2022, desperate Afghans at the Humanitarian City had staged a protest, demanding that the United States take action to speed visa processing. The protest did not seem to have had any effect, and in April 2023, a SIGAR report would estimate that for the United States to process all existing Afghan Special Immigrant Visa applicants (a category whose processing broadly supersedes that of P1) would take approximately 31 years.

I remembered Nasrat as a sweet, earnest, rather vulnerable boy who was extremely close to his large Pashtun family and meticulous about his schoolwork. Now he was isolated from his family, with few friends in the center and no computer or books.

He had gained weight; he looked bleached and sick. It seemed to him, he said, like only God cared what happened to him. He spent most of his time lying on his narrow bed, using his mobile phone to listen to recitations of the Koran.

The Breaking Point

Meanwhile, in Kabul, something had started to fracture in Idris. “It is like I lost my self somewhere,” he wrote to me. “It breaks me. I don’t know how to get through it. I never thought I would be this hopeless in my life.”

He had recently been stopped and harassed by a Taliban street patrol who had demanded to read his phone messages and emails; ever since, Idris had become paranoid, convinced that Taliban were following him in unmarked cars.

He obsessively tracked which areas of the city the Taliban were targeting for house-to-house raids, watching for signs that they would come to his house and arrest him. Sometimes he was so overwhelmed with sourceless terror that he could not bring himself to leave his room, even if it meant he would go hungry.

He was still attending online classes, but he was deeply depressed and did not expect to survive the year. “You know I have big dreams,” he wrote, “but staying in this hell will kill me. I am lost. All doors are closed to me.”

What Happened to Torpekai

In her 2009 collection Frames of War, the theorist Judith Butler asks the question: When is life grievable? Butler suggests that the valuation of life is possible only under conditions in which that life would or could be grieved if lost.

I find this a vexatious formulation because, in fact, refugee lives are often grieved. In 2015, poetry was written about the death of the Kurdish Syrian refugee child Alan Kurdi, who drowned when his family tried to cross the Mediterranean in a small boat. In March 2023, a few news articles mourned the loss of the Afghan journalist Torpekai Amarkhel, who, like Kurdi, drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean.

But in the 17 months before her death, Torpekai — a tough, quick-witted woman whose impressive resume included working as a TV news anchor and in public affairs for the UN — had tried desperately to find a path to safety.

She had been extraordinarily fortunate in securing a visitor visa for Turkey, which was not possible for most Afghans, but she had no way to extend this visa and nowhere else to go. She was in contact with international colleagues from the UN, who tried to help, but it quickly became clear that all conventional visa pathways were closed to her.

Somewhere in the Mediterranean water between Turkey and Italy, not so very far from the beach where the Benjamin memorial’s exit is barred by a pane of glass, death subjected Torpekai to a transformation.

Prior to her death, the apparatuses of NGO and state had investigated and deemed her life a bad investment. The qualities that would make her death grievable — her bravery and defiance, her intelligence, her successful career, her perceived vulnerability as a Muslim woman — were not considered, while she was still alive, to have any value.

Only at the instant of death did her life accrue value, at the moment when it ceased to make uncomfortable material demands. Grief, after all, costs us nothing. It is cheap and very convenient to mourn the dead.

Adolfo Kaminsky: Selective Memorial

A few weeks before Torpekai’s death, obituaries in international newspapers had mourned the loss of Adolfo Kaminsky, whose remarkable life story had achieved international renown through a 2016 New York Times short film called The Forger.

An Argentinian Jew living in France at the outbreak of the Second World War, Kaminsky joined the French Resistance as a teenager. Between 1941 and 1945, his work forging documents for the Resistance saved the lives of 14,000 Jews.

The same obituaries that lauded Kaminsky’s work during and just after the Holocaust buried all but a passing mention his long and energetic postwar life. He was devoted to forging documents for a wide range of people resisting colonization and oppression.

Kaminsky worked extensively with Algerian insurgent movements fighting for independence from France, with South and Central American liberation struggles, revolutionary movements in Africa, anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, and Americans seeking to escape the Vietnam draft. He came to vigorously reject the young State of Israel when he saw its racism towards Arabs, and refused to even visit, much less accept citizenship.

Perhaps the outsized emphasis on Kaminsky’s wartime heroism at the expense of his other actions reflects the Holocaust’s immense cultural weight. I suspect that Kaminsky’s postwar life also raises uncomfortable questions.

After all, what the obituaries delicately elide is that Kaminsky was a criminal. (“Of course everything I did was illegal,” he says in The Forger.) The most accurate term might be people smuggler, an occupation that has come to be intensely vilified.

It is troubling to think of Kaminsky as a people smuggler because he so obviously does not deserve vilification. If we think of him this way, we are forced to consider the possibility that what he did during the Holocaust was also people smuggling.

Kaminsky himself, after all, saw his life work — both during and after the Holocaust — as characterized by a profound continuity. It was, he told Adam Shatz for the London Review of Books, “a long, uninterrupted resistance” against “inequality, segregation, injustice, fascism, and dictatorship.”

He described to his daughter, who wrote his biography, how his ideological commitment to free movement had emerged from his own traumatic experience of precarity in the age of the nation state: when his family immigrated to France from Argentina during his childhood, they were initially deported to Turkey.

Kaminsky’s younger sister, conceived in Argentina but born in Turkey, was denied both Argentinian and Turkish citizenship, trapping the family in a legal limbo. “It was then,” Kaminsky recounts, “that I really understood the signification of the word ‘papers,’ those indispensable documents that allow you to move legally from one state to another.”

After the end of the war, in spite of his work for the Resistance, he once again found himself facing deportation from France.

Discussing his choice to become involved in smuggling displaced people to postwar British Palestine, Kaminsky says:

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Oil color in transfer and water color on paper. The following year it was purchased by Walter Benjamin, who saw it as symbolizing the Angel of History.

“I was strongly in favor of the idea that every individual, especially if they were persecuted and their life was in danger, should have the right to move freely, to cross borders, to choose where their exile should take them.”

He conceived of his mission, in other words, as one that was about saving any people, all those people, whose lives were imperiled by an inhumane apparatus against which no argument could be admitted.

I mean life here in the broadest sense — not merely the biological body that even in the camps was sometimes allowed to endure, but that immaterial fingerprint that marks us as creatures who exceed our bodies, who reach forwards into the future, fragile and gorgeous and infinitely generative. Or, perhaps, as creatures not unlike the Angel of History that Walter Benjamin envisioned in the well-known essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” written just before his death.

Benjamin’s Vision

The Angel of History is a figure driven further and further from Paradise by the winds of a storm that it cannot control or master. It cannot see its destination; it faces backwards, towards a past in which suffering is heaped upon suffering.

The accumulated weight of all this misery does not resolve itself into progress. We do not stand upon a tower made of the past, nor will it ever elevate us above some more savage condition. We cannot have faith, in other words, that the machinery of history is propelling us in the “right” direction.

Benjamin believed in a liberatory future that could only arrive through a miraculous, “messianic” moment — a paradoxical moment in which what has been impossible becomes possible, a moment that breaks through the seemingly inexorable boot-march of our history.

For Benjamin, writing in France in 1940, such a moment must have been hard to envision. And yet he argued elsewhere in the “Theses” that our lived present, the “time of the now,” is always “shot through with splinters of messianic time.” At any second, it is possible that our world itself might crack open and reveal itself to be stranger and more merciful than we had imagined, because “every second of time was the narrow gate through which the Messiah might enter.”

When I imagine Benjamin at the end of his life, I imagine him hoping against hope for that moment when the impossible might become possible — when it would occur to some officer at the Spanish border that he could simply choose not to perform what the law demanded. When he would opt out of the machinery of injustice and accept the only, unbureaucratic argument that Benjamin could offer: I know it is the law, but I want to live.

And there is a chance that, for the other refugees traveling alongside him, Benjamin’s death engendered just such a moment. An abrupt reversal of the official position on 26 September allowed them to remain in Spain as guests.

However, it seems more likely that this reversal was attributable to the large bribe that one of Benjamin’s fellow travelers, Sophie Lippmann, had hastily assembled and paid to one of the border guards. The apparatus of bureaucracy merely ground on, indifferent to the lives it was consuming — or worse, aware that that a certain quota of flesh was requisite for its continuing smooth function.

So we are left unsatisfied, troubled by visions of an impossible future and by the certainty that it was possible for one brief moment — that the latch of that narrow gate was in our hands.

In the future where we did not hold the gate shut against him, the Messiah slips through that sunlit portal, Walter Benjamin emerges shaken from the Hotel de Francia the next morning; he walks out into the Catalonian sun; he stands at the unbelievable edge of the Mediterranean and gives thanks that he has lived to set his eyes on these blue waters, waters that have yet to swallow their cargo of dead.

Flowers for Rashid

In the “Theses,” Benjamin imagines the past as a field of flowers that struggle to turn their faces towards some sun of liberation that (through, he writes, some “secret helio­tropism”) they sense though they have never seen it. If you sit long enough in the cemetery on the hillside in Portbou, you can watch heliotropism in action. The blind faces of yellow flowers search for the sun.

I texted Rashid a picture of the flowers. It was spring; the riot of color was amazing in this place where I was allowed to be and he was not.

As I turned away from Karavan’s memorial, I could see from its depths that last thin small splinter of sun — the place where light entered from the Mediterranean coast, though nothing else could enter. It grew smaller and smaller, until it was a mere glint. And then it was gone.

POSTSCRIPT: As of July 2024, the American University of Afghanistan was able to evacuate Rashid to Qatar, where he is still waiting for his P1 resettlement. Idris decided to risk traveling to Pakistan in the hopes that his P1 resettlement would be processed. He is still waiting there. That same month Agence France-Presse reported that more than 44,000 Afghans who have been approved for U. S. resettlement are currently waiting in Pakistan.

Nasrat gave up hope of being resettled in the United States. In 2023, he applied for and received an Australian humanitarian visa. He is now pursuing permanent residence there and hopes that his family might be able to join him someday.

September-October 2024, ATC 232