Mohamed, Shyroz and Qyzra Walji are dead. The police call it a homicide-suicide. Their friends and families know different. At a vigil held for the family, Qyzra Walji’s teacher for five years, Nichole Wardyce insisted “I have no doubt that if Qyzra and her family had been granted their Canadian citizenship, they would still be here, and Qyzra would have continued being a leader and a voice for others with disabilities."
For fifteen years the Walji family had tried to regularize their status. They had been denied at every turn largely because Immigration Canada deemed the family a burden on the healthcare system. Qyzra had cerebral palsy which impacted her motor functions but not her intellectual ones. Like thousands of others, they were under immigration detention’s control, not in prison, but having to report regularly to an officer whose primary objective was to coerce them to “voluntarily” leave the country.
Their last meeting had been two days before they were found dead. The London Free Press reported that the family was facing imminent deportation. Yet Chris Alexander the Minister of Immigration released the following statement through his press secretary: “The Walji family was offered multiple chances over several years to become permanent residents with regularized status.” In other words, instead of taking responsibility the Feds are blaming the Waljis.
The question I am struggling with is who is responsible? How do we talk about power and resistance, while also starkly naming the systemic policies that create the psychic violence and trauma which make death an option? How do we also, at least in the case of the Waljis, speak of domestic violence in our communities? How to speak of our many struggles against depression and abuse in the context of state/capital supported (and) inter-generational violence?
For many migrants living without full status, immigration controls and petty bureaucracies are a dull hammer constantly thudding away at our psyches. An arrhythmic discombobulating beat that pushes too many of us into sadness and confusion. We know all too well the feeling of waiting endlessly for our work permits, study permits, refugee cards and visas to be granted. The sharp intake of breath and the emptiness in the pits of our stomachs when an email or envelope from immigration unexpectedly arrives are a visceral reaction migrants know all too clearly. School administrators, service providers and employers insist that we cannot be paid, cannot be enrolled, cannot be given services even when it is their disjointed system at fault. The tears of frustration, the clenched fists, and the misdirected rage that accompanies years of uncertainty are difficult to quantify, almost unbearable to explain.
The Waljis are not an anomaly. A recent University of Toronto study found that many undocumented migrants show signs of depression; including reduced appetite, insomnia, fluctuations in weight, unexplained crying, lack of motivation to work, and feelings of helplessness. One participant reported losing their voice out of fear and stress after hearing about immigration raids in the community. Another participant Rafael says ““The stress is horrible. You vomit, yellow vomit…and [get] stomach pains – gastritis, from being so upset and helpless… You can’t do anything! It’s an injustice what they do.” The report identified chronic stressed induced weight gain or weight loss in migrants who paradoxically reported not having the time to eat. Valeria reported: “I’ve grown a belly, something I didn’t have before, all this fat around here. And I didn’t sleep much, I was working all the time. I’ve gained 15 kilos”. The study reported that women, unlike men, particularly bared the burden of close friends or family’s emotional or economic hardships which also contributed to their poor mental health.
Domestic violence, patriarchy, racism, ableism, homophobia and other forms of social oppression are as deeply imbedded in migrant communities as they are in others. Yet, violence in Muslim communities is too easily painted over as a result of some sort of ‘cultural deficit’. University of Toronto’s Sherene Razack writes “Acknowledging little or no responsibility for the conditions in which Muslim migrants in the West live, and indulging in the fantasy of a superior nation who must discipline and instruct culturally inferior peoples, Western states pursue policies of surveillance and control that heighten the level of racism those communities experience and that exacerbate the conditions under which Muslim communities become even more patriarchal and violent towards women.”
The logic of cultural deficit came particularly to light in the killing of Aqsa Parvez which created an incredible racist assault against South Asian communities in the mainstream press. South Asian Muslim anti-violence against activist and artist Farrah Khan, co-founder of the AqsaZine project says about this practice "There isn’t a nuanced conversation happening around when young women are murdered, and what can be done. The conversation is very much focused on the specific racialized communities where these women are from. And [related to that, that the] immigration border should close down, that we should not be allowing “these people” to come into “this country.””
This same logic must be challenged as we confront the Waljis deaths, holding our communities and Canadian policies accountable.
What of resistance? Right now, 191 migrants are on strike in Lindsay, Ontario. At least two of them have been on hunger strike for nearly 60 days, locked up in segregation for 40 days. Amin Mjasiri and Lynval Daley have been starving themselves, rather than be caged without an end in sight. Both men have been jailed for nearly 28 months facing deportation that never arrives. Speaking from prison, Amin Mjasiri says “I missed three of my sons birthdays, I missed three anniversaries with my wife….I cannot see myself here being detained indefinitely and thinking about them. That will drive me crazy. So I have to keep it out of sight and out of mind. How inhumane is that. I am a father and I am a husband. Should I even be allowed to feel like this.”
Post-Colonial scholar Achille Mbembe writes that ‘states exercise their sovereignty by exercising control over mortality, defining life as the deployment and manifestation of power’. Canada wanted the Waljis to die, it insisted on removing their bodies to places where their mortality could be excised without the accompanying stench and trauma of that putrefaction entering Canadian nostrils. The Waljis decided otherwise. Challenging Canadian sovereignty, they became part of Canada, beyond the state’s ability to murder them; in fact they are buried here. The hunger striking detainees in Lindsay, and others across the country, are taking a similar step. Rather than be confined in camps they can be silenced in, and then removed to Other places to eventually die, they are asserting power over their own mortality. In a sharp turn, Canada now strives to keep them alive, coercing and forcing them to eat the prison food, to re-metabolize state power.
Somewhere in the Walji’s and the Migrant Strike refusal, we must find ways to understand our own mortality, and our integration in a state attempt to determine it. Somehow we must find paths to challenge domestic violence and patriarchy in our communities while determining new responses to mental health and disability. Somehow we must carves spaces to mourn, spaces to remember and the will to struggle.
Thank you to Dr. Atluri for her comments and feedback.
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