CHRIS THURMAN: The unbearable lightness of being a refugee
Rwandan-born artist Serge Alain Nitegeka has different insights to offer about what migrants carry with them
To migrate is to carry. Some migrants, the unforced ones, have the good fortune of being able to pay shipping companies to do the carrying for them: furniture, kitchenware, décor, books and houseplants, all packed into containers and dispatched safely across the ocean. Others are not so lucky: fleeing with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, they carry memories and vestiges of belonging from the place they once called home.
An archetypal image of the refugee is, in our collective imagination, a figure carrying an object — a satchel, a parcel, a bundle, a sack. So familiar is this iconography that a fetish has developed among journalists and photographers catering for the settled, nonmigrant media consumer: “What’s in the refugee’s bag?” is a subgenre of human-interest stories covering the phenomenon of forced migration. The poverty of the displaced person is romanticised, with a combination of pity and sentimentality attached to the notion of “a few cherished items”...
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