Souleye’s “Dark Journey” — Annotated
Migration is as old as time, as basic as breathing. It’s takes courage and strength to move to a new country to find safety, or take care of loved ones. Migration is also an act of bravery and love. But how often do you hear those words said about immigrants today? It’s time to say it more.
Read this annotated version of Souleye’s poem, “Dark Journey,” with links to learn more about the content and context.
Watch Souleye deliver the poem in Fulani.
When Souleye Ball delivered his poem “Dark Journey,” about African migrants’ road to the U.S. at Pulaagam: A Celebration of Fulani Heritage, you could hear a pin drop. You didn’t need to understand Fulani, the language of his words, to understand the poem’s meaning. It was underneath the words, in their beating hearts.
But diving deeper into the translated and annotated poem, we learn:
Migrants are not born; people become migrants due to circumstance. Most people do not actually want to leave everyone and every thing they know and love. “I remember the lands full of rainwater and the pastures that fed the calves, mooing and frolicking lightly, calling their mothers who would answer. Ah, what a life!” Souleye said.
Environmental and political factors conspire to make migration inevitable. “Today, drought has taken over. None of the lands of Diéri or Wallo are harvested. There are no more green fields,” he said. “In my country, we have constantly protested, cried out, screamed, and demanded justice, freedom, equality, democracy — but we never got any of it.”
There are universal traits humans share — across races and religions — whether we’ve had the experience of moving to another country or not. We love our families. We want to make them proud. We want to be brave, but that’s scary, too. “Better humiliation at the end of the road, than at the bottom of waiting,” was a core tenet in Souleye’s Mauritanian community. This will sound familiar to many.
This annotated version of Souleye’s poem provides cultural references and context for people who aren’t familiar with Mauritanian history, culture, geography, and U.S. immigration policy. It offers a deeper level of understanding of the poem, and we invite you to listen to his delivery as well.
Reading and listening to the poem might open up even more questions that would be brave of you to explore. Why do some African migrants come over land, instead of taking a plane? Why risk the “hyenas and snakes … the road cutters armed with rifles and machetes?” After all, Souleye said, “They scared even the bravest among us with their screams. We no longer thought of bowing to pray.” Did they make such a dangerous journey just to be brave? No. It’s because coming to the U.S seemed like the best of the bad options. But U.S. laws did not allow them to get visas to come on planes.
There were just two options for leaving: the European route, and the “Bottom Route,” to the United States. And more people taking the European route seemed to be dying.
U.S. policy doesn’t actually facilitate legal immigration, except for some highly educated immigrants and close relatives of people who are already citizens or legal permanent residents. U.S. immigration laws were written over a century ago, not with today’s needs in mind. And since the 1990s, Congress has made the immigration laws even less functional, so that people with legitimate asylum cases are being deported back to the dangers they fled, and people who end up marrying U.S. citizens or obtaining other paths to legal residency cannot adjust their status.
The general orientation of U.S. immigration policy is one of “necropolitics,” the idea that by making migration deadly, you can deter it. But how do you repress the basic instinct to survive? When people already feel like they are knocking on death’s door, leaving is the only option. Instead of pretending that migration is something that can be stopped, governments could recognize that migration is simply part of being human. People have always moved, since the beginning of time, and always will. If they need safety, opportunity, or both, they will seek it out. If they need to take care of their families, they will find a way. Governments can facilitate migration safely by reorienting laws and policy toward a compliance goal, instead of a deterrence and repression goal. This works in many other areas of administrative law.
Or they can continue to make people risk their lives, and let some die, trying.
This is where Souleye’s poem ends: at the border of the United States, “The American police stopped us, put chains on our wrists and ankles, and imprisoned us. I turned around and saw my friends standing, some crying, some handcuffed, put on a plane and dumped at the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana. And my heart broke. Yeah.”
The poem ends with brave people who just survived a harrowing journey — one that many did not — meeting an undignified system, instead of the free and democratic society they had hoped for. Their fates, after the end of this poem, are mixed. Some, like Souleye, are still here. Others, like his friend Aboulaye, were deported. By documenting and telling us about the “Dark Journey,” Souleye is challenging us to create an immigration system that is more worthy of the people it meets — and us.
As people with the power to advocate for better immigration laws, and in honor of the brave immigrants who have taken this Dark Journey, that is what we should do.
Resources
To understand how the U.S. immigration system is failing people, and reforms that would improve it, read "The System Works As Designed: Immigration Law, Courts, and Consequences"; "Scarred, Then Barred: Immigration Courts Harm Black Mauritanian Refugees"; and “Behind Closed Doors: Black Migrants and The Hidden Injustices of U.S. Immigration Courts,” original research from the Ohio Immigrant Alliance.
See also “A New Paradigm for Humane and Effective Immigration Enforcement” by Peter L. Markowitz.
To learn more about the dangers of the European journey that some Africans take, watch the movie "Io Capitano."
Read this annotated version of Souleye’s poem, “Dark Journey” and watch Souleye deliver the poem in Fulani.
