What does “migrations” mean to me: a word, a language, a phenomenon, experiences, a peril, a source, life, death?
What are the possible definitions, the contours, the borders?
It is interesting to note that the term “migrants” has become extremely common today, but in reality, in our historical, temporal or spatial realities, who would really know how to define it and according to what criteria consensually recognized by all of us? Indeed, no definition is established, among others, in legal or legislative matters.
More radically, more authentically, as it is, in fact, simply about us, human beings, we could approach “the thing” as a fact of meaning and of faith in our humanity... beyond the multiple dramas experienced throughout history. Faith in our migrations as living beings because they are life, possible renewals, astonishments and transformations of the gaze, even if, for many, the price to pay, singularly or particularly, is a radical migration: exile beyond a death, partial or total, announced or unexpected.
In short, migrations are our migrating conditions, each time unique, each time announcing another tomorrow. Certainly, often, too often, constrained in the shackles of traditions, sociologies, cultures, visions that we, humans, have made very narrow, according to our beliefs, sciences, theologies or philosophies. But, it remains that these moments of narrowness, even of strangulation, are also passages to think, to build, in oneself and with others, differently.
Possibilities appear, new migrations are revealed.
So, it is certainly neither wise, nor good, nor right to restrict “migrations” to a word, to a dimension, to a definition, however reasoned, scientific, multifactorial, interdisciplinary or multicultural it may be.
Our migrations are not turned towards the past, but live for a future in the present.
Migrations are an invitation to a conversion... mine, ours, to a change in my view of, among other things, the question of what, why, of my being... of my existence.
As diverse as they are singularly unique, our migrations constitute us, cross us, both mine and those of others.
Together, they are what I am, they shape what I become, whether I like it or not.
Migrations make us “migrant(s)”; they make us “free”, from life, from death.
Gilbert
