Continental Drift

 A sailboat carrying 122 Haitian refugees washed ashore on Key West last week—with at least two of its passengers having to be hospitalized for dehydration, after spending seven days on the open ocean. They are only some of the many people forced to flee their home by a raging humanitarian crisis in Haiti that has upending most aspects of daily life. And many of them may only experience a temporary reprieve in the United States before being deported back to the perils they fled. 

The Biden administration recently announced a welcome expansion of the country's current temporary protected status designation—shielding an estimated 300,000 more people from the threat of forced removal. But the cut-off to qualify for this status was June 3—too early for the people stranded in Key West. Meanwhile, the administration has been running multiple deportation flights to Haiti over the past year—even as the country was too dangerous for its own former prime minister to land his plane. 

In this spectacle of inhumanity toward Haitians fleeing a refugee crisis—and one, moreover, partly of the United States's own making—we see a longstanding pattern repeating itself. Key West has long been the first place where people land after making a desperate break for safety and opportunity across the open ocean. Migrant smuggling in the Florida Keys is thus a theme of more than one great American novel: from Hemingway's To Have and Have Not to Russell Banks's Continental Drift. 

Banks's novel also dwells on the theme of the U.S.'s historical responsibility. His classic 1985 novel interweaves two narratives of displacement: that of a blue collar yankee from New Hampshire who ends up smuggling undocumented immigrants off the coast of Florida to support his family—and that of a family of Haitian refugees forced to flee the island due to the repression of the U.S.-sponsored dictatorship of the time: the notorious multigenerational Duvalier regime. 

Today, the Duvaliers are long gone. But the patterns of U.S. involvement in Haiti have scarcely changed. The current epidemic of gang violence plaguing the country was facilitated in large part by the presence of U.S.-made guns. And the country's public security crisis notably deteriorated on the watch of the previous two U.S.-sponsored Haitian governments—both of which the U.S. helped install in the first place, and both of which ended up moving in authoritarian directions. 

In short, the pattern of the U.S. backing strongmen who force Haitians to flee their own country, generating a refugee crisis, is repeating itself. 

But the plight of the people who washed ashore on Key West also put me in mind of a different novel about immigration—this one set in England. 

I read Christopher Priest's troubling apocalyptic novel Fugue for a Darkening Island this last week. One of its most viscerally disturbing passages occurs when a ship full of desperate African refugees attempts to land on England's shores. Priest's novel—set in a dystopian future in which a far-right xenophobic government has come to power and suspended civil liberties and the judiciary—imagines the British navy standing pat and refusing to offer aid, as countless British citizens stand on the beach and watch as the ship gradually sinks and innocent people drown. 

Priest's novel is hard to classify politically—and in many respects, reading it today is deeply uncomfortable. On the one hand, the book could be interpreted as a right-wing screed. It imagines a future in which Soviet funding has enabled a group of African refugees to take up a militant struggle against the British government. The novel depicts hypothetical atrocities committed against British civilians in the course of this war that would fire the imagination of any white racist. 

Indeed—perhaps for this reason—Priest apparently rewrote large sections of the novel for a subsequent edition that was issued in 2011. But I read it in the original 1972 version, because I wanted to see his more unvarnished conception of at least one possible future.  

Yet, as much as some passages in Priest's dystopian novel might lend themselves to a right-wing reading, this is no Camp of the Saints. Priest's protagonist is equally disgusted with the xenophobic fascist government that takes power, in response to the Soviet-backed incursion. The novel therefore seems to be as much of a warning against the threat of the Enoch Powell/"Rivers of Blood"-inspired anti-immigrant backlash that was gripping Britain in his era, as it is itself an anti-migrant polemic. Priest plainly shares our horror, for instance, at the thought of the Royal Navy standing by and allowing a ship-full of refugees to sink to their doom. 

As uncomfortable and unplaceable as the novel is in its politics, meanwhile, I felt drawn to it in our present political moment—for obvious reasons. Not only is it evocative of the right-wing xenophobic turn in U.S. politics, which is expelling Haitian refugees to a humanitarian catastrophe and which may soon lead to the re-election of the nativist-in-chief, Donald Trump; it also reads as a prescient warning about current events in the UK and Continental Europe. 

The upcoming UK elections are being fought in part over the conservative government's scheme to expel incoming asylum-seekers to Rwanda, after all. And France just witnessed a surge in electoral support for a far-right nativist party that is threatening to eliminate birthright citizenship, earmark jobs for French nationals on a discriminatory basis, and ban certain public expressions of Muslim religious faith. 

The rise of the neo-fascist Tregarth administration, which Priests warns against in the novel, therefore does not seem so far-fetched these days. 

It also shows foresight on Priest's part to imagine that it is refugees at sea who would be the first victims of an authoritarian right-wing regime that turned its back on human rights commitments. Not only is the UK scheme to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda (regardless of nationality) reminiscent of the horrifying episode in Priest's novel in which the British navy refuses to save the lives of the drowning migrants. It also reminds one of the Australian government's long-running scheme to warehouse refugees in offshore internment camps in Nauru and elsewhere. 

The U.S. government has similarly interdicted Haitian refugees for decades, and there was even talk recently of reopening a Guantanamo Bay processing site as a temporary facility to detain them—part of a Nauru-like scheme to prevent them from ever setting foot on U.S. soil. And then there are the echoes of the disgraceful chapters of earlier history, in which the U.S. government refused entry to Jewish refugees aboard the S.S. St Louis, for instance—turning them away from New York harbor and thereby condemning many to annihilation in the Holocaust. 

The image that Priest summons of a powerful government able to render aid to refugees stranded at sea—and pointedly refusing to do so, on xenophobic grounds—is not without its real-life parallels. 

In the end, Priest's protagonist is forced to consider joining a ship full of other displaced British civilians who are fleeing the country's neo-fascist government and its civil war. They plan to make for the French coast—but they have no guarantee they will be received there either. And under today's emerging "National Rally"-version of France, they almost certainly wouldn't be. 

Thus, the displaced British refugees have lived to take the place of the African refugees they refused to aid. The guilty conscience of a country that denied refuge to other people in need has come home to roost. Now they are the ones in exile from their homes, pleading for shelter elsewhere, only to have the door slammed in their face. 

I can't help but think what may happen in this country, if we proceed to elect our own far-right neo-fascist government in November—if we proceed to install our version of the "Tregarth" government. Will we take the place of the refugees we refused to aid? Will American citizens soon be the ones desperately sailing on the open ocean, pleading for entry at ports around the world—only to be turned away? Will we wish that we had granted shelter to Haitian refugees, when we find ourselves in a few years in the same proverbial boat? 

Then we shall be the ones, of whom Dante prophesied:

You shall leave everything you love most dearly: 

this is the arrow that the bow of exile

shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste

of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know

how hard a path it is for one who goes

descending and ascending others’ stairs.