Nomad is an island made of me
I was walking the beach line when I heard two shells shushurrating between themselves. I stooped to listen…
“…Felix Marquardt’s come out with a book (1) …. …migration, climate, inequality and addiction too. Who are they, those people that are the title of your book, the new nomads?”
It was Isabelle Roughol talking to someone who answered her thus,
“…we tend to label migrants and people who move around the world differently depending on whether they have money or not, whether they are white or dark skinned, whether they are fleeing war or famine or both, depending on whether they are looking for something and they’re not under duress, they’re not refugees… …we need to help refugees in a way that we don’t need to help digital nomads. But at the same time we’re missing something because of these labels about what we share and what in our experiences we have in common… … rediscovering our surroundings, rediscovering slow mobility”
Good stuff piped down from Borderline. Hadn’t I just been thinking the day before about diasporas and wasn’t it time to write something?
The first thing people pick up on nomad is that it is anagram of monad. A monad is a philosophical structure denoting connection free, isolate. The second thing everyone likes to rub in is that nomad comes from Greek nomos, pasture. As Felix points out “… if you forget the pasture, then you’re not really a nomad”. The nature of my pasture, private collectors and local galleries, means I move on every five or six years when the pasture is exhausted enough for me to nose out the next one, slow nomadism…
Sixteen years ago the move was into a foreign land. A layer of separation added. I learnt to live inside a crystal whose uneven sides refracted local culture. I expressed myself in ways I couldn’t have in England. I learn’t it wasn’t a crime to be excitable. The latest move is from deep countryside into a small town. I have had enough of green, I have had enough of the conservative brutality of those who have lived for generations in the same spot, working more and more for the banks.
In the small town I am moving to I will arrive in two forms: I will have a market stall selling the books I know I’ll never read again and I will have a studio with open days. Naturally I have pre-conceptions — I fear the town may be too small, I fear it may be too white, I fear being asked to take sides in squabbles. But as an observer, at this particular time, I don’t think I could have chosen a better spot to watch the pressure waves do their stuff.
Pressure waves? Let me give you the picture as I see it and where my thinking crossed with Borderline’s. The key word is diaspora also Greek meaning dispersion or scattering like puff seeds from a dandelion. Sometimes diasporas operate as an overclass, the normans or romans in england, the english all over the world. There are open states and closed or closing states and threaded thru them both are diasporas, implicit trade and knowledge routes. Some open states are wanting to become closed states, they are paying lots of money for fences and steadily brutalising their border forces.
Sometimes diasporas are a specialised clan like the jewish families who financed the continental wars of the eighteenth century. In most Western European countries and in the USA and Canada and perhaps Australia and some rich Arab states the number of residents who have relatives in another country is a power factor. The trust necessary for fund transfer at distance is built by strong family re-inforced by archaic honour codes.
Sometimes the diasporic are an exclusive brethren like the gypsies. In Dreamtime, Bruce Chatwin referred to gypsies “… communicating over colossal distances by singing secret verses down the telephone telephone network”. (that was from the time of phone-tappers). He goes on to say that “… gypsies see the world as a hunting ground — their word for settlers is the same as their word for meat”. In 2017 I coined the word gitanisation on my wordpress site. I said,
“… an old Spanish gypsy song has it (with a laugh, a hop and a cry) that the world is full of objects made by others for the taking. Why soil your hands with work when there are others who seem to need the status that goes with it? Let them produce the goods, we will take them when we need them.
Soiling their hands with work (until the lay offs began with the neo-liberal order) meant that people had a relation however dulled and abused with the process of production, with fabrication and its attendant skills.
This relation to production that the gitanie spurned for reasons of honor (the nomad code) is now absent in the new populations growing up into worklessness.
As it was for the hunter gather of the stone age the world is stuffed full of objects and nowadays since there is no relation to production, objects can be seen as natural or given, so that there is a seamless progression from walking down a street and plucking apples from trees growing on the railway embankment to zooming around on a scooter and plucking Rolex watches “come from the other side”.
When neo-liberals began their crusade they did not think about whether creation would keep pace with destruction. Since they were not interested in social questions they did not ask what would happen if despite discouraging circumstances the poor increased their birthrate in adversity and learnt from other cultures fatalism and absence of civic sense. And began after three half-generations to be socially creative in the manufacture first of gangs then tribes who saw the world as a collection of objects to take, if you were fit enough to do so.
Paralell with the neo-liberal crusade another universe of objects has been built. The Internet. By now it is near enough to be called a rough and ready Borgian copy of everything people recognise on Earth. Millions of cameras attached 24/7 act as eyes and ears of a gigantic occurrence beast. There are visual artists like Richard Prince who make fortunes just from re-working this traffic flow.
Habituation to the experience of seeing images of Rolex watches transforms the original object into a template carried in the head. There is then an obsession to actualize it. The brain can only take so much stimulation before it throws up deferred pleasure and goes for the real thing, whatever the risk, or rather becomes eager to enter the risk area for its sense of lightness, its absence of hand holds, its tingle of the present moment and the fascinating idea that you might not come back…
You could say the scooter robbers are copying and pasting, except those sticky old concrete objects refuse to duplicate. Don’t worry, in time the Rolex will re-grow on your wrist — the insurance companies are working on it.
Nifty eh?
Closed states are turning more and more on their own people, the open states have tried to export liberal democracy and the rule of law in order to create markets. Afghanistan is the place marker for the failure of this narrative. The people there have other ideas about how you do things, the formula taxation/representation doesn’t run. In the natural way of things all the people shifting out of failed westernisations, out of soviet style demagogracies out of tango flavoured fascisms are streaming into the growing diasporic population, more or less attached to their birth culture, more or less easy in their host culture.
Away in the background the great sino bow wave arrives. I heard China described as an authoritarian mercantile state the other day on Policy Exchange by the people responsible for the Iraq and Afghanistan fuck ups. Well why not? Years ago, sitting around in their pyjama style uniforms, they must have looked at us and said, shopping? you want shopping? ok we’ll give you shopping.
1 Felix Marquardt: The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution is Making the World a Better Place, by Felix Marquardt. Simon & Schuster UK. 2021.
