 between a border and a breath. I went to the trees to breathe, but the bark was smooth silver and the bark was rough dark. And I found my breath taken by the leaves, by the way they lit the hills, glittering in the sunlight like arrowheads. I went to the trees to the leaves, to the branches and bark to breathe, but the skin, the skin, the scarred and wounded skin. The third of October 2013 saw the sinking of one of the many refugee boats that had already sunk, trying to cross from the north of Africa, from mainly Libya to the Italian island of Lampedusa. And in that sinking, 380 people are believed to have lost their lives. One of them lost her life whilst giving birth to a child. They were largely Eritrean refugees, some of them South Sudanese, trying to reach Europe where they would make what is their right, a claim for asylum, and ask to be given protection from the persecution they experience in both those countries. 2013, two years before what has come to be known as the refugee crisis, but which I prefer to see as a crisis of hospitality. The image you can see there is taken from the Guardian, and the coffins are notable because they are beautiful, they're expensive, they've been crafted, they were part of a national day of mourning declared by the Italian government in the face of that loss. And in them is the body in each coffin of a refugee, posthumously granted asylum. To arrive to go through the claim, the asylum process is one thing, but here we see the image, the paradox par excellence of what refugee integration means in the context of European law at present. You can be integrated upon your death. And to personalise it, in one of those coffins is the body of a member of my family. Where are your monuments? Your battle's martyrs? In that grey vault, the sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is history. Fast forward to 2017, and we're trying to get a group of young people to come across to the University of Glasgow to perform a piece of work that they have made and devised as young people, and to do so as part of my inaugural UNESCO lecture. There are 20 of them on a project funded by the UK government. 20. And all their visas are refused by the government who has paid for them to do their work. We will not let you pass, say the government. We will not let you pass. We will not let you pass. We will require of you a birth certificate, a passport, a non-refundable ticket, insurance, inoculation. We will require of you £3,500 for the promise of processing your visa on time. But we will not process your visa on time. This we will not do. For the same application, the identical sponsorship letter, for this we will make a decision which is arbitrary. Ten, we will allow to pass. Seven, we will not decide. We will not decide. We will not return your papers and you have no power, no voice. This we will do. We will deny your audience the delight of your dancing. And we will not let you pass. We will separate you from your sisters and brothers, fathers and fathers. And to those who dared to ask who dared to believe, they too we will frustrate. We will not let you pass. We will, we will not, we will not let you. The image you can see behind me is an image of 18 of the dancers in total who after quite a considerable campaign did pass and actually did arrive just in time to be able to fulfil a dream of theirs to come to the UK and to entertain audiences like yourselves with their dancing. So here we are, 2019 inside what has been a millennial long epic story. The epic story of movement, of human movement, of migration, of human migration. The epic story of people fleeing for safety. The epic story of people just wanting to travel to be with people they love. The epic story of curious minds seeking something new out of their curiosity. The epic story of those who would withhold hospitality from Kiff and Kin. The epic story of the softening of the borders of the skin. Under European law we're not meant to have refugee camps on European soil. We are meant under European law under article 3 of the Council of Europe to be able to make provision in the event of the need of many people to reach safety in Europe to be able to find ways of sharing the number of people who would come. But of course Calais, Lesbos are just names that have been come synonymous with refugee camps across Europe in the last four or five years. Whilst they shouldn't necessarily exist, it's clear that in many cases they do and they continue to exist in our imaginaries in fragmented ways even after they've been closed down. In 2016 in response to a request from the UK government to design and organise together with others a visit to the Calais refugee camps by our Scottish elected representatives who were humble enough to say that they really didn't know what a refugee camp was like or how it might feel to visit or what it would mean to pick up the case load which was huge in their constituencies and was addressing the question again and again of how to give protection to those seeking asylum, refuge and sanctuary. Members of the Home Affairs and Justice select committee from the UK Parliament joined myself, Dr Teresa Pietuntini from the University of Glasgow, Pina Axu and Amal Azudin, two experts by experience and wonderful young refugee background women and then two people who were trained considerably building the space where trauma exists particularly for women and vulnerable adults and we spent a week together out of the glare of the cameras listening, listening, listening to the stories of those who live in the camps. The image you can see there is a picture of the church that was built largely by Eritrean refugees as their sanctuary within the camp that was a sanctuary and in front of it you can see a space that is cleared and when we were there, it was just after the camp in the south, Corsut had been bulldozed and whilst we were there we could hear the bulldozers coming close to the mosque that had also been built by some of the some of the Muslim refugees in the camp so a sense of threat to refuge being there all the time. I think it's a really interesting space the space of the camp and the space of the Calais camp as it exists in our imaginary but also as it existed in reality during the time when the camp was being constructed this is an image that I took but it's been written about by my colleague Teresa Piercentini really brilliantly I think where you can see in the image behind me the containers and you can see the kind of ramshackle tarpallyn makeshift housing and shelters the ones that look a bit like a play school house if that's an idea that resonates with you and you can see the fence between them and so the French government were trying very hard to ensure that what they had was a space that was safe and in order to do that they put up these containers where 14 asylum seekers would sleep every night you had to be scanned to go in you needed to give your biometric data maybe your fingerprints, certainly an ID card and to go in and out of a place where you'd be wandered like in airport security and then you have these spaces outside which were cold and which were damp and which were very much part of the massive volunteer effort that was being produced largely from young people from the UK many of my own students went for a time to see the Calais camps to do work there and to stay there and to be part of the humanitarian effort in the camps one of the questions that is raised by this image is what sanctuary is and for whom and many of those being asked to live in those containers were Eritrean refugees often young men who'd escaped the draft and were running from the draft there is pretty much an indefinite near 30-year conscription to the army with no pay in Eritrean and those who refuse or those who are conscientious objectors or those who voice dissent to the state will be taken to Sawa and will be imprisoned and will be tortured and the places where they're imprisoned or tortured are in our detritus containers that look like these but aren't quite as new those symbols par excellence of the freedom of movement of goods across the globe and of stasis and imprisonment for people used in Eritrea for torture and imprisonment used in the Calais camps to control and contain and prevent further movement of asylum populations the Eritreans that we spoke to preferred to live in the little huts that they built for themselves places they felt they could order with dignity for themselves where they could live a life that felt like it was trying to integrate into a sense of normality where some of them ran little shops and one of the ways that you knew they were proud of them was because they would order the tomatoes in particular patterns and the Galois cigarettes would be laid out in a way that looked attractive and they might just try and entice you in to sample their tea or their coffee or the things they were making places that felt like people had a right to live and eat and shop and play as opposed to the spaces that many people associated with deep trauma and what they'd left and for me this is right at the heart of the ethical dilemma that is facing us in 2019 the ethic that is an ethic of containment that is in the name of security or certain groups of people and an ethic which requires a dispossession alongside it and it takes me back to the words of that great young thinker Seymolve writing a time not dissimilar though also different from her own in the 1930s when she said that once a certain class of people has been placed by the authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value then nothing comes more naturally than murder and the view you can see there is the bulldozed sight in its teddy bears children's shoes broken Barbie dolls bits of sleeping bags the things that are normal in life so one of the things I think we see happening in this moment in time is both what is often termed necropolitics a politics which tolerates and produces death and also the invention of something that I'm calling alongside others necroethics the development of an ethic that tolerates and produces death Hannah Arendt that great philosopher of the Frankfurt school writing in an essay which has become a almost a regular meditation for me over the last few years and her essay We Refugees it's a very short piece but it's really worth reading and she wrote it up on her arrival as a Jewish refugee to New York and she says in there apparently and it's a very feisty resilient essay a very challenging essay to all of us I think today as she speaks from that period in time she says apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human being that are put in concentration camps by their foes and internment camps by their friends and that was haunting me as I was looking at those container camps in France these are friends and these are internment camps and this is the fate of the refugee another way perhaps of describing this that I've seen rather beautifully played out on social media is the description of what is called the ethic of the garden fork and the story told that there are two ways of understanding the way we might respond to a child who kicks a ball over the fence into the neighbour's garden and one of them is the neighbour who thinks that landed in my prized tulips and decides to put a fork through the ball and then to throw it back over the fence and the other one is the neighbour who thinks never mind the prized tulips and goes round with the ball and maybe joins in the match or takes round some jelly babies or makes sure that neighbourliness is actually enacted together Necroethics the garden fork through the ball and then a different kind of performance of hospitality which is the breaking down of the border that is the fence and a creation of neighbourliness and a social bond in these circumstances listening in to what people say is a very difficult task and it's a very difficult task for a number of reasons so for those of us like myself who work alongside refugees and asylum seekers diserning and hearing their voices is a hard thing one of the reasons for that is because we expect everyone to speak English another reason for that is that to speak of pain is a very difficult thing and can often take many years one of the things we know from psychotherapy looking at people who survived the holocaust is that it often took 40 years for people to begin to be able to tell a story that they might remember and often they had to do it in a language which wasn't quite so immediate as the one in which they experienced that trauma in the first place Elaine Scarry says that intense pain is also language destroying as the content of one's world disintegrates she says so that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its subject world, word, self and voice are lost or nearly lost and it's where our work of integration of piecing together the fragments of story of hearing into voice and silence of song and poem of fragment of object of the things that people bring to try and peace their lives back together again becomes a collective endeavour Elaine Scarry wrote those words as she was studying what it is that people who are members of Amnesty International do and nearly half of those whose word and self and voice has been lost through their experience of torture and one of the things that people experience in torture is the robbing of self of the robbing of voice the inability to speak and defend themselves in the face of that and the need for others often with a great deal of eloquence writing letters and I'm sure many of you I've seen Amnesty International badges in the audience tonight many of you have written letters with I bring my respectful and most cordial greetings to your excellency and somehow that tonal stability as Elaine Scarry calls it sitting alongside the accusation of a government that they are creating such a crime such a breach of human right as to be engaging in the practice of torture this is our work this is the space in which our work is happening today who shouted daybreak in the middle of the night who shouted liberty in the middle of oppression there was just me yet again daydreaming darkness for when and away I see mixed messages from the mix of messenger and speeches lengthening and lessons lessons yet words so convincing looks so convincing if seeing is believing I disagree with my eyes who shouted unity in the middle of a divide there was just me yet again daydreaming darkness for when I'm awake I see division and inequality the mathematics of reality even in another time averages for the mean yet words looks so convincing if seeing is believing when I disagree who called for celebration in the middle of misery there was just me once more daydreaming darkness for when I'm awake I see nothing nothing but things out of a test that makes a black blood cold I see ignorance sitting pretty wisdom wisdom sitting lonely with words so convincing if seeing is believing for the first time the daffodils do not bring me cheerfulness their nodding yellow heads incongruent, stubborn sunshine at the wrong end of winter it is wartime when the wind whistles against the seed corn the plowed fields may or may not see harvest there are old gun emplacements on the clifftops looking out towards the new clear power plant around their concrete bases the same jaundiced flowers springs heralds or signs of our fear I do not know whether to fight or to flee if the east wind will spread pollen or freeze away the first hope of life on the borders of Europe they are hurting people into cages on the borders of America they are hurting people into cages on the borders of Australia they are hurting people into cages and sending them back sending them back to the bombs and on the borders of this field this field in Calais there are daffodils nodding away as the bodies wash again out to sea so that was the miserable section can I ask you to give a warm welcome and round of applause to my colleague Tawana Sutole who kindly joined me to mix us up a bit tonight the question for me in all of this is where do we go for our wisdom another way of putting it might be what would manoeuvre say and for me that means going back into some old ethical questions and maybe yes looking back to the period in the 20th century when we were faced with questions like this before in Europe but also going back to other places and one of the old ethical places I've been going back to is reading the desert mothers and the desert fathers and in the stories of the desert fathers there is a lovely story of some really quite grumpy fed up hermits who really weren't that good at what they were doing going out to seek people who might have wisdom and one of them came along and said to the wise hermit the grass is growing up my chimney and that was his complaint and the hermit answered and you have driven away hospitality and I rather love that image of the driving away of hospitality the cold home I've not had any heating in my office for the last three months because a dry riser has broken and the parts is coming from Japan and it could be November and what he does to me is make me grumpy and I'm driving away hospitality from my office with my bad mood a home without hospitality an office a city a country without hospitality without people who want to visit is a deeply miserable place there are villages in parts of Europe and the ones I know about particularly in parts of Bulgaria where the population's youngest member is 76 years old but they have said they would rather die out than take in young refugees who might bring life to those villages a home a village without hospitality is a miserable thing and for me the counter ethic to this necro ethic this ethic of death this ethic of the garden fork through the ball is one where we learn again and again and again to perform hospitality in whatever small ways or big ways we might want to do that and for me when we talk about refugee integration we're talking about hospitality mutual hospitality we're not talking about assimilation we're not talking about vulnerable people who've made extremely difficult journeys who've proved their case then being able to take on a burden of becoming just like me because that's what never going to happen we're not talking about the old racist forms of assimilation we're talking about forms of mutual integration into one another's lives we're talking about hospitality as something we all do in society together integration as a question for me of how we do mutual reciprocal hospitality individually it starts with each person but also collectively in the way that we organise our universities, our institutions our schools, our homes our parliaments it's also then about those spaces in between us what Martin Buber called desksfishing menschliche desksfishing menschliche what translates as the quick of human relatedness that little thing between us that tells us that we're connecting with somebody meeting somebody, seeing somebody both different and the same as ourselves the integration of the performing of hospitality Jacques Derrida said that hospitality is culture itself we about it we do not have culture is his other way of understanding that without its practice we will become moribund we will be wed to a death wish necroethics fanatus and the Oxford English dictionary which I love to read I think it's my favourite piece of book to read at night and to go online and to look things up and see their etymology and where they came from and when people used them the Oxford English dictionary describes hospitality in this lovely way the act and practice this isn't theoretical it's about doing it of being hospitable and that is about the reception so yes about welcome and entertainment that's why I love tourism of guests, visitors or strangers with liberality and goodwill with liberality and goodwill that's a very wide encompassing definition of hospitality that for me also can be a wide and encompassing definition of what integrations like at its best today I spent some time with the refugee women's strategy group listening to them and it was a tough meeting, they're angry they don't get childcare it's hard to claim asylum support people are not getting the education they need their claims aren't being heard they have stories of people who've been in the country for 19 years and still the Home Office hasn't found or decided their case these are lives in limbo one on hold and they need somebody to blame and to listen and often that has to be me these are tough conversations but they also wanted to moan a bit about governance structures and how they work and why is it we can't be paid for the time we put into the governance of our small organisation and when that comes up I have an easy response which is I don't get paid either for the work of governance I do that's just about life in society that's a really good sign that you're integrated if you're moaning about governance structures if you're wishing it was Friday at 5 o'clock and you could go home there are many things about integration for me which actually aren't about the all singing, all dancing, nice sharing of culture but are actually the things that just tell us that we're living a good structured normal life and we have aspirations and want to make things different but for me hospitality is also deeply embedded in that Greek word Xenia the word for guest and the word for host the word that's at the root of the word xenophobia or xenophilia guest friendship guest friendship it's indivisible at some point we split them off into hosts and guests but Xenia guest friendship is a really important concept and in her wonderful work looking at what happened when those words split apart into host and guest and Carson identifies the exchange of money of coinage as being the point at which that happened particularly when poets were paid for their performances and she says that no one who handles money remains unchanged she says Xenia the philosophy the art the practice of guest friendship of hospitality is emphatically non mercantile in spirit profit is not the point our governance structures for my refugee women's strategy group are part of a gift economy to the well-being of society and Carson says the point in gift exchange and hospitality the point in Xenia as a form of relationship is to put yourself in debt is to place yourself in a place of vulnerability and that can only happen for the good of society if that is mutually shared if we all put each other in one another's debt from time to time in this space of hospitality the point is to put yourself in debt that might be culturally engaging in things you wouldn't necessarily go to or engage with or understand that might be linguistically where you might learn to greet somebody or speak to somebody in a language that doesn't slip off your tongue easily one of the refugees we worked with from DL Congo who was resettled in Scotland when we asked him about his experiences of resettlement when we were trying to decide how to resettle the Syrian refugees who came a couple of years ago he said you people in Scotland you're stingy with your languages you don't speak to us in the street now there's a good reason for that we've got our umbrellas up and our Gore-Tex huds and we're battling against the wind but in sub-Saharan Africa you really can't get up and walk more than 200 yards without being greeted by several people on the street it's not a culture where you're going to be lonely or suffer the diseases of loneliness but easily because every day someone will have greeted you and that's very different to the experiences that people have where they might go for whole weeks without anybody greeting them so maybe a tiny thing practical thing we can do is that greeting that meeting that's speaking to one another at bus shelters and on subways and in queues the point is to put yourself in debt a gift economy of reciprocity where collectively and individually we're practising hospitality I also firmly believe that the practice of hospitality is a place where aesthetics and culture and art are crew it's no accident that tourism is the world's number one industry and that cultural tourism particularly is one of the ways in which that's performed around food and drink and all its inventiveness around music and song and all its inventiveness integration is an art and therefore it's also an aesthetic integration is the art of making culture as reciprocity and therefore it's also the art of what Nadia Bolzweba calls making room she talks about the ethic of hospitality as being like the kind faced lady who's sitting on the underground who moves her bag so you can sit down that's hospitality that's a gift economy that's making room for others and the image you can see here in the picture of course is an image of reciprocity and of gift economy because what you can see in the picture is the handing over of cloth which is a very honouring gift to receive from Ghana on the day when Ghana celebrates today its independence and you can probably see that this is what I'm wearing and I've only recently come to realise from my colleague Nadensua Tadro who made the cloth into the suit that I'm wearing and my colleague Gamily Tadro who turned it into the cover on the volume of this book of poetry that Tawana and I have put together that the image on it can be worn in either direction up or down and the image and the direction I'm wearing it in is of a sheft sword the cloth acts like a passport when I wear it I have to collect stories for my colleague who's researching what happens when I wear her cloth and I'm involved in that gift exchange and I was giving a lecture at the United Nations a couple of years ago and it was one of the first times I wore this suit and it was the day that the COP16 agreement was being signed at the United Nations so the helicopters were flying in like Beatles landing and there was enormous security and so I had to give my name and my passport and my fingerprints and everything to NYPD before I was allowed onto the complex and I went up to one of the police officers to show my passport and to do the checks and the world's press are behind me also trying to get in it's a bit of a scrum and the police officer just looks at me and says that's okay I don't need to see your passport mum so I'm a bit perplexed and I said do you want to check my names on the sheet and he said no no no I don't need to check your names on the sheet come with me I will walk you to your your building so he started walking together and then he said to me I'm Ghanaian thank you for wearing my cloth for making room for my world in your life so of course these are elements which are aesthetic, which are collective which are ways of doing reciprocity but as the poet Rilker says and these words haunt me regularly you have to change your life and the more I engage with these questions the more I realise how personal this is because as the philosopher Lucerae says meeting a stranger outside of our own safe boundaries is rather easy even satisfies our aspirations to do good as long as we can return home and appropriate between ourselves what we have in this way discovered but to be forced to limit or to change our home or our way of being at home is much more difficult especially without being unfaithful to ourselves on Friday this week it's International Women's Day but for me it's also 10 years since our foster daughter now foster daughter arrived on our doorstep theoretically to stay with us under the auspices of positive actions room for refugees scheme which I'm looking in the audience and I know several people in the audience have volunteered with as well way before it became a trendy thing to do and that the Guardian wrote columns about and she was supposed to be with us for a couple of days normally when you become a mother you get about 8 months notice I understand we had about 21 minutes and have experienced what refugee life is like what the asylum situation is like what it means to be under threat of dawn raids what it means when your daughter is taken away from you what it means when she's put into detention what it means when she can't really speak your language yet my daughter doesn't speak her mother's tongue what it means to grapple with these paradoxes and what it means to try and live in these spaces day in day out it's a visceral way of understanding what we do but it's one of the ways which has most deeply informed my activism as well as my scholarship and my art and this beautiful image is one that she drew when she was released from Dungaebel before she was granted status in this country and recognised as a refugee and it says Salaam Salaam being the Eritrean word for peace and Salaam being the word for mercy and it hangs over our door at the place of the threshold at the sign of welcome my name is Alison and I am a recovering racist I was born with this addiction because my ancestors were white and the country I am from grew fat in every imperial fight money, privilege and power come down the barrel of a gun that wasn't just in history it's still how this is done the thoughts that call me loudly towards your skins and eyes and tears are the thoughts that are intention to assuage those birthright fears so do not idolise my actions do not praise my words as bold do not look at my intentions or the papers that I hold the thoughts I have of charity are just part of this addiction inherited from a line that is a long and bleached out fiction I do not have to worry when my skin is in a room or on a train or in a car or in the immigration tomb I'll be given space and money and more time because I'm white because my ancestors were slave owners or slave drivers and right but you my friends, my kindred will be skinned another way flayed into diminishments through ever greater punishments and all those cruel admonishments the only proper meaning is that for all my days commitment will be to a healing labour on my deathbed in my dying I will be a racist too that it's shouldering of the burden that can lead to something new not denial of what sticks to every tone or shade or poor but the making of relationships that brim with something more something giving and forgiving of the shame upon my skin something real and raw and honest that can live with history's sin at times our conversations will make our skins dissolve and around us through the laughter a new world may revolve when the tears are all that binders and the skin gives way to bone and through this work we'll love again and call the earth our home I think by now you'll understand that I like working with metaphor and I like working with the idea of movement and that for me metaphor is part of how we get out of where we're stuck in often quite arid ways of thinking quite technocratic solutions a hope for a technical fix like that container camping calais and into a place of movement Sally McFague has said that metaphor is for human beings what instinctual groping is for the rest of the universe the power of getting from here to there metaphorical thinking she says is the way human beings selves not mere minds and that embodiment matters to me deeply move in all areas of discovery in no port now and Carson speaks about the work of living being the ancient struggle of breath against death death for me the border breath the way we try and overcome it and one of the things I've been trying to do in my work is really shift the metaphors that we might work with moving into metaphors of breath and air and space but also metaphors of drift and movement that can maybe unpickers and unravelers from where we are ones which look at what it means to be moored to be fixed to be in a safe place to be out of the swing of the sea to be in a place where we have security and stasis and safety where we're confident in the order of things and what it might mean to be unmoored in the place where I think our ethics are today we may have had a real sense of certainty about our ethical stance we may have felt we'd worked it through that we knew where we were we may have felt that we had in Europe after 60 years of peace a way of doing ethics that worked and now we're seeing it becoming unmoored losing anchor drifting not quite sure where we are where we're going because being unmoored means movement means a possible loss of control a move to what might be unknown to be uncharted waters and certainly for us today in the west with our quite singular often monolingual epistemological frameworks we're floundering we're spinning we're not quite sure where to go all we know is that our thinking the most curious as our minds might be isn't serving us because the bodies are still piling up on our borders and if ever there's a sign that our ethics have failed it is the sign of the willful creation of a place where that happens and a justification of it our ethics are adrift adrift 70% of all migration in the world is based in what metaphorically we call the global south the global south is a metaphor for the idea of all those who live on the margins largely located in the geographical south of the world sub-Saharan Africa North Africa across the Middle East into Afghanistan into many parts of Southeast Asia 70% of migration occurs in those contexts and without much fuss without much fuss so for us to be equitable and for us to learn I believe we need to learn from those who know how to do this without the bodies piling up the ones who have refugee camps that house several million the ones whose populations have possibly been changed by over a quarter such as in Lebanon of refugees coming to live amongst them and without the fuss that we've created over maybe 2000 people being resettled on the vulnerable persons resettlement scheme from Syria in the UK over the last three years there's something seriously out of kilter in our thinking so I believe we need to look at the ethics and the aesthetics of those spaces in the global south and just two weeks ago I was in Ghana at the Inception event for a 20 million pound project that I'm co-directing with my colleague who's leading this, Heaven Crawley which is looking at south-south migration with a devolving of money and budgets and understanding and research to those parts of the world so that we can listen and learn from what we do not know In Aflau there is no one to check you in or check you out no one to touch you up or weigh your baggage no body in boot and above head behind line there is no unheard of people no holding pens no paper cuts no board, no number no pass, no date there is no priority clearance no catwalk for the privilege there is no EU not EU no dignity stripping interview Cwyl, dywan nair wobe o nair Wendy, there are no receptors no detectors no specialised scanners for thermal diseases in fact there is only us only us and the trees and elephants for in a matter of seconds in a manner of speaking we are across the frontier all across him it wasn't elephant grass was it surely it was flax and the ground was stony and my feet bare close to the broken road I was just walking across a road into a field and there were friends with me and our skin was on fire because the day was pregnant with gifts coming close to their time you knew we stood on hallowed ground as did I the natural ditch between a road and a field is a place where magic and mid-chief have always been made there were admonishments but they were laughing, not fearful there were remonstrations but they only served to strengthen our resolve and the sense of safety I saw no elephants in the grass no snakes or angels either but the flax was growing the twine which would weave enchantments opening this improbable border ground beneath our bare feet to be another unstoppable conduit for the stories between us about to be born border crossing in Togo the singer-songwriter Kareen Polwet wrote a beautiful drama called Wind Resistance that many of you may have seen and I'd like to finish my part of this by reading from her understanding of migration she says that she is a singer-songwriter and she is a singer-songwriter she says in September the geese snake in across the Firth of Forth from their summer nests in Iceland and the coastal cliffs of Greenland clattering and honking in ever-shifting schemes my garden is a flight path I watch the wind the outstretched wingtips of each migrating geese create an upwash a pocket of wind resistance for the geese tucked in behind and below these nukes of ease these aerodynamic sanctuaries cut the drag by up to 65% it's a wonder and it's also a gael bit and struggle to sustain cooperation every goose takes a turn stepping up falling back laboring and resting stepping up falling back laboring and resting like sky-born socialists no lone bird bears the brunt it's a gorgeous symbiotic dance stepping up falling back laboring and resting stepping up falling back laboring and resting but I fear for the weather to come she says and we're not going to make it on our own I think we've all been moved and as well as informed by a very very rich experience