The Wherewithal of Life. Michael Jackson

that gave his story a quasi-mythical dimension, as if it were an allegory of Everyman.

      In calling a story mythic, Girard means that private, historical, or geographical details play a secondary role in what is essentially an archetypal form, in this instance “a persecution text,” examples of which can be found in all human societies. Girard’s insights into the conditions under which such persecution texts are born and his argument for why certain elements recur in them are directly relevant to Emmanuel’s story. First, Girard notes, stereotypes of persecution tend to draw on a cluster of closely related words that suggest deep affinities linking critical events to criminality and condemnation. Thus the Greek verb krino, meaning “to judge, differentiate, and condemn a victim,” is the etymological root of our words crisis, crime, criteria, and critique.²⁴ It is worth observing, therefore, that during the critical period in Emmanuel’s childhood, when, following the death of his father and the family’s exodus from central Uganda and migration to Bugisu, Uganda was suffering civil unrest, widespread famine, and the impact of the HIV/Aids epidemic. Moreover, from as long ago as the mid-twentieth century, Bugisu had the highest density of population per square mile in Uganda, and in the 1960s increasing pressure on scarce land meant a growing intolerance of the landless poor, who were not only resented but often accused of witchcraft and thievery.²⁵

      In 1980, despite post-Amin turmoil, the first elections for eighteen years were held. But in many parts of the country, only half the population was self-sufficient in food, and infant mortality rates had increased tenfold.²⁶ To keep his baby sister alive, Emmanuel fed her small balls of moist clay, while he survived by drinking cattle urine and eating leaves from bushes. His mother, who had traveled far and wide in search of work or money, returned to the village on one occasion to find Emmanuel so weakened by starvation that he was hospitalized, unable to walk, and for two long weeks it was not known if he would live.

      When the world falls apart, people are typically thrown into panic, despair, and rage. These emotions tend to be projected onto the cosmos or polis, which is described as corrupt, rotten, or awry, as well as onto members of the community who are seen as outside the pale, anomalous, or abnormal.²⁷ That is to say, in crisis the moral order is suspended, and it is this very suspension of normal moral constraints that opens up a space for both aberrant and exemplary behavior. On the positive side, one might cite the risks that Emmanuel’s grandmother ran in feeding her grandchildren. For the philosophical ethicist, K. E. Løgstrup, this is an example of what he calls “the sovereign expressions of life”—spontaneous and unconditional acts of compassion toward another that eclipse any consideration of the cost to oneself. Such actions are both free and ethical, Løgstrup argues, because they are not wholly determined by moral rules. Nor can they be instrumentalized and generalized after the fact as moral norms.²⁸ What Løgstrup fails to mention, however, is that the very crises that often bring out the best in people also bring out the worst in them, and immorality is part of the fallout from this state of moral anarchy.

      Individual or social differences that were tolerated in times of plenty may be dramatically exaggerated and seen to be implicated in the misfortune that has befallen the community. But the person or persons to be blamed are not simply marked as different by virtue of appearance, personality, age, or gender. They are strangers within, outsiders masquerading as insiders, bent on mischief or worse. Emmanuel was therefore already a potential victim when he arrived in his mother’s village in 1979. His mother had forfeited all rights in her natal village when she married and moved away several years before. That she was widowed and did not have her late husband’s brothers to take care of her made no difference. As for her children, they had no claims on their mother’s kin, who were within their rights to treat these refugees with kindness or drive them away. Given the terrible conditions of food scarcity and political uncertainty, the die was cast against the strangers. Not only was their social status considered anomalous, but the older children spoke neither Lugisu nor English, were bereft of any adult male guardian, and came from elsewhere. Whatever they did and whatever they said only reinforced the impression that they were outsiders. It was but a short, logical step to seeing them as threats and imagining them as monsters. If they were bullied at school and persecuted by their aunt, it was not necessarily because their oppressors were motivated by malice; rather it was because the oppressors fell prey to the pressures they were under in a critical situation where, morally, politically, and economically, the world seemed not only disordered but perverted. Under these extreme conditions in which the moral order is in abeyance, it is not inconceivable that incest and bestiality should make their appearance as signs of the times. But there is another logic at play here, for the victim is not only persecuted for not belonging to the place where he or she had hoped for asylum; he is persecuted because he is made morally responsible for the misfortunes that have befallen that place. To save themselves, the local populace drive the foreigner from their midst, believing that he will carry their affliction out into the wilderness and free them from it.

      Persecution becomes a double-edged sign. For the victim, it sets in motion a fantasy of being owed recompense for the pain and deprivation he has suffered. If he is guilty of no wrong and has been the victim of a series of gross injustices, then he has earned the right to one day reclaim his lost dignity, his lost life, and this sense of possessing a natural right to redemption will henceforth govern his thinking. For the persecutor, a very different transformation occurs, since no one robs another person of his or her humanity without losing something of his or her own humanity. The persecutor has only two options in dealing with this loss. He can attempt to erase from his mind and conscience all memory of his victim. To achieve this, he hopes the victim will disappear (dying of starvation or driven to flee), or he actively drives the victim from his sight and his community. Alternatively, he may beg the victim for forgiveness, thus erasing the moral difference between persecutor and persecuted, as the virtue of a humble apology cancels out the hurt the former visited on the latter, who, in accepting the apology, grows in moral stature.

      Long before Emmanuel’s story was finished, I was aware of the symmetry between its two chapters—the first located in Uganda, the second in Denmark. Both chapters were persecution texts, though their background situations were very different.

      Emmanuel’s arrival in Denmark in 2002 coincided with the adoption, by the recently elected Liberal-Conservative (Venstre-Konservative) government, of immigration legislation that made it difficult for foreigners, as well as Danish citizens with immigrant backgrounds, to obtain family reunification with non-European spouses. This legislation reflected post-9/11 anxieties about Muslim immigrants in Europe, as well as a growing concern in Denmark over the depth and sincerity of migrants’ attachment to Danish culture and their ability or willingness to integrate. Underlying this concern was an implicit distinction between “real” and “not-quite-real” Danes.²⁹ As Bertel Haarder, the former minister of integration, put it in a newspaper article published in September 2003: “We [the Danes] have a job, because we care about what our family and neighbors think about us, and because we want to set a good example for our children. But foreigners do not feel these inhibitions in the same way. They live in a subculture outside the Danish tribe. That is why they so quickly learn about the possibilities of getting money [out of the welfare system] without making an effort.”³⁰

      It was against this background of xenophobia and cultural fundamentalism that Emmanuel experienced his first inklings of what it would mean to live in Denmark, married to a Dane, and of what he might stand to lose by leaving Uganda. “It was during that period when I was in university that I met Nanna. I was beginning my thesis at the time, and we first came to Denmark the day after I handed it in. It was supposed to be a very brief trip to meet Nanna’s parents, because I had to return to university to complete my second and final year. But with the new Conservative government in power, and the new immigration laws, we decided to get married immediately. Ordinarily, we would have waited so my family from Uganda could attend the wedding, but we felt pressured because ‘family reunion’—which is the official name for applying for permission to come and live with your spouse in Denmark—would only be possible if we were married. This was my first dramatic encounter with the Danish system, a system I have come to know extremely well.

      “So I didn’t have time to think about the offer the Islamic University had made to sponsor my master’s there, and I didn’t