The Grammar of Belonging: Bodies,Borders and Kin in the Belarusian—Polish Border Crisis

Abstract

This article aims to be what Jasbir Puar referred to as ‘an unfolding archive’. It makes a critical intervention at a historical crisis point as it is unfolding. It sets out to examine the logic that writes the relations between bodies, borders and kin during the political crisis that transpired at the border of Belarus and Poland in 2021. I think of this logic in terms of a ‘grammar’, drawing on the idea articulated by Hortense J. Spillers, where ‘American grammar’ fleshes out the connection between slavery, kinship, nation-building and the processes of gendering. I examine the rubrics of the hegemonic national grammatics in contemporary Poland, which establishes who counts as kin and who belongs to the nation in the context of the border crisis. I offer the concept of ‘declining’ kinship to seek generative (im)possibilities to articulate affinities and solidarities running against the dominant system of reproductive nationalism.

This article aims to be what Jasbir Puar (2007, p. xix) referred to as ‘an unfolding archive’. It makes a critical intervention at a historical crisis point as it is unfolding. I set out to examine the logic that writes the relations between bodies, borders and kin during the political crisis which transpired at the border of Belarus and Poland in 2021.

I first became familiar with the forested borderland region of Poland neighbouring Belarus when I was gathering material for my book on human–forest political ecologies. When the purported ‘migrant crisis’ started, I felt compelled to consider how it affected my research space and the relations between various bodies that occupy, inhabit, visit, cross and transit it. In this article, I focus on the emergent realignments of the—gendered and racialised—bodies, borders and kinships in the remote Polish borderland. I think of them in terms of ‘grammar’, following the idea articulated by Hortense J. Spillers (1987) in her pathfinding analysis of ‘American grammar’.

In ‘Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an American grammar book’ (1987), Spillers fleshes out the structural connection between chattel slavery, kinship, nation-building and the processes of gendering. Inspired by this work, I examine the rubrics of the hegemonic national grammatics in contemporary Poland, which establishes who counts as kin and who belongs to the nation in the context of the Polish border crisis. To analyse the workings of this grammar in establishing who is recognised, cared for and protected, and who is excluded, I have followed media coverage and online discussions about the border crisis and refugee solidarity efforts (such as Families Without Borders, Help for Refugees on Poland-Belarus Border, No Borders Team, Hope and Humanity Poland and activist coalition Grupa Granica, among others). I have examined official statements and political decisions taken in response to the situation on the border; I have followed the Polish Border Guard on Twitter and combed through the responses supporting their actions on social media. I have talked to independent refugee aid volunteers and those protesting racism and violence against border crossers.

If, as Christina Sharpe (2016b) tells us, racialised ‘kinship relations structure the nation’, who is considered to be kin—‘like us’ or ‘one of us’? What happens to language when kinship is denied or unrecognised? I call the ‘Polish grammar’ a generative matrix that produces and imposes the boundaries of political belonging—underwritten, I argue, by ethno-hetero-reproductive nationalism. This article explores how a denial to enter the country also spells a violent expulsion from the realm of meaning. Specifically, it asks how the rules of a national grammar elevate certain desired ‘kin’, at the expense of writing others out of meaning. To this end, I mobilise the concept of ‘s/kin’—a nod to Spillers’ (1987) and Sharpe’s (2016a) respective work on Black kinship—to examine this process in connection to legacies of European imperial violence and racism and their latent presence in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).

I seek an alternative to the exclusionary model of national kinship in concrete practices and expressions of refugee solidarity in response to the humanitarian crisis on the Poland–Belarus border. For example, I turn to the refugee solidarity platform Families Without Borders (Rodziny bez Granic) and analyse how it performs ‘kinwork’. I explore these emergent (re)articulations of kinship and their (im)possibilities to stymie the dominant, racialised system that orders and others border-crossing bodies.

cutting the s/kin

In the summer of 2021, the number of people attempting to cross irregularly the frontier between Belarus and its neighbouring countries, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland, sharply increased. According to the Polish Border Guard, in 2021 nearly 40,000 people attempted to cross to Poland via the verdant border with Belarus (Szczepańska, 2022). This number is 300 times higher than in 2020, although it is difficult to independently verify this data. For Belarus’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, rerouting the migration traffic to the EU via Belarus was a calculated political move to retaliate for the sanctions the European Union had imposed on the country (Roth, 2021). For the crossers, the perilous journey to Europe starts with Belarusian state-run ‘tourist agencies’ scattered across major cities in the Middle East, offering tourist visas allowing their clients to enter Europe through Minsk (Outriders, 2021; Tondo and Churlov, 2021). The route straddles the European Union’s most eastward external border through difficult terrain. The frontier runs along the Bug River in the south, and then turns northeast, cutting through a 1,500 square metre forest complex that includes dense primeval old-growth woodlands. For many people on the move, their destination lies farther west, for example in Germany (Euronews, 2021; Outriders, 2021). ¹ In the absence of safe and legal pathways, thousands of people fleeing violence and other tribulations from their home countries, mostly from across the Middle East and Africa—Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Congo, among other places—continue to see the route as their best shot at a safer and better life, and a viable alternative to, for example, the deadly Mediterranean route.

Poland responded to the growing number of irregular crossings by declaring an emergency state (Chancellery of the Prime Minister, 2021) and militarising its border—a 2.5-metre-high razor wire fence (later to be replaced by a steel wall) was rolled out and additional armed border patrols and military personnel were dispatched. Upon their arrival at the ‘gates of Europe’, people on the move reach a dead end in their journey. In Belarus, migrants are forced by the border guards to cross into Poland, where, if intercepted by the Polish border forces, they are pushed back over to Belarus in a hopeless vicious circle of back and forth across the border (Amnesty International, 2022). People on the move and humanitarian organisations have accused Poland of pushbacks, which is a forced and unlawful expulsion from the state territory that violates the Geneva Convention and other binding international refugee protocols that guarantee the right to file for asylum. ² Victims of pushbacks end up in an impossible position: they cannot continue their journey, file for protection or return. In the borderland area between Belarus and Poland, many wander in the wilderness for days, without access to clean water, food or shelter; some crossers reported eating leaves, while others got sick from drinking dirty water (Ambroziak and Szukalska, 2021). Similar violations of human rights have been documented at different European borders. For example, the European Agency for Border and Coast Guard Frontex has long been accused of involvement in pushbacks and violations of the rules on the use of force across the EU (FSWG, 2021). ³ As I prepare this article for publication, pushbacks continue to be carried out on the Polish–Belarusian frontier. ⁴

Border violence is backed by the securitising discourse that narrates people on the move as foreign and threatening. Polish officials accused Belarusian soldiers of ferrying migrants to the border and escalating the crisis, but nevertheless treated people on the move as hostile trespassers. The Polish Defence Ministry published fearmongering tweets about ‘aggressive migrants [who] continue to throw stones at our soldiers and officers’ while ‘the Polish security services [are] repelling an attack’. ⁵ In this war-like discursive reality, the state is justified to protect its border by all means necessary. The Polish hard-line response to the border crisis is very much in line with the hardening border regimes and migration policies across the European Union and the UK characterised by expansion, externalisation and fortification of borders. In response to the 2021 border crisis, the European Commission (2021a, 2021b) went as far as to allow its member states bordering Belarus to loosen asylum protections, allowing expedited deportations and prolonging the process of registering asylum claims.

In November 2021, as temperatures dropped below zero degrees Celsius and the forest floor became covered with a thick layer of snow, the situation worsened, putting crossers’ lives in danger: several people went missing, ⁶ at least twenty-seven died ⁷ and the survivors went through a traumatising ordeal. ⁸ Authors of an Amnesty International (2022, pp. 2–3) report, based on over a hundred interviews conducted from November to December 2021 and in March 2022, describe ‘extremely difficult conditions and traumatic experiences on the Poland-Belarus border, some [interviewees] having made 20–30 or even more attempts to cross’. The Polish state abandoned its responsibility to rescue people trapped in the wilderness by forcing them to return to Belarus, despite mounting evidence of violence, beatings and abuse that migrants were subjected to at the hands of Belarusian border guards.

To justify such violence, the state uses a narrative strategy to enact a ‘cut’ between the territorial body of the nation-state and people on the move. This is manifest in the events at a border crossing in Bruzgi–Kuźnica in November 2021. To protect themselves from being pushed back, a group of border crossers formed a migrant caravan to arrive at the official border post together and file their asylum claims there. In response, Polish authorities closed the checkpoint. Law enforcement sprayed tear gas at the crowd and used water cannons to repel them. Asylum seekers were portrayed as coming at ‘us’ from the outside. Their arrival was narrated as an unexpected (‘sudden’) event and a hostile attack prepared by Belarus, which Polish president Andrzej Duda described as ‘a sudden and unforeseen action against Poland … to check our ability to react, our determination to defend our border against this sudden orchestrated crisis’ (PAP, 2022). ⁹

In this vein, Stanisław Żaryn, the spokesperson for the coordinator of the Polish special services, tweeted that ‘foreigners storming the Polish border reach Belarus via Russia. The services of the Lukashenka regime manage them and support them in attacking the Polish border’. ¹⁰ In this statement, the country’s territorial integrity is under assault and people on the move are rhetorically allied with the aggressor: Belarus and Russia. The border crossers are Russia-backed ‘weapons’ or ‘instruments’ in the ‘hybrid warfare’ rather than its victims. Meanwhile, the position of the victim is already taken by ‘us’, the rightful inhabitants of a territory historically threatened by Russia’s imperialist incarnations: the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and—since February 2022—Putin’s Russian Federation.

The separation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is enforced by varied border practices (checkpoints, passport control, border patrols, etc.) as well as infrastructure—like a barbed wire fence or a steel wall—which physically separates those on this side of the border fence and the ‘other’ side. The border operates as a cut or a line dividing two states and two bodies: that of the nation and that of a stranger. While performing a geopolitical cut, borders produce physical marks and injuries on the skin of those who attempt to cross them. Those are literal, material marks: cuts made by the razor wire, injuries from falling off the border wall and more. The cuts go deep; they lacerate the s/kin.

‘S/kin’ firstly refers to a living, feeling surface of the body inscribed by racialised and gendered forms of violence. The slash which runs through the word ‘s/kin’ ruptures it to indicate the place of a bodily injury but also lays bare the violent operations of separation to which border crossers are subjected. Thus, secondly, ‘s/kin’ serves as a capacious term to consider how inclusion and exclusion from ‘kinship’ determine the boundaries of national belonging. Where pushbacks separate and disperse families and tear apart kindred travellers, whose relations are recognised as meaningful? In national Polish politics, who is viewed as a desirable member of society?

rules of filiation

The idea of ‘s/kin’ emerged for me in the process of reading and thinking-with the concept of ‘kinlessness’ in Christina Sharpe’s and Hortense J. Spillers’ respective work, where kinlessness is the condition of Black being in the aftermath of slavery. Hortense J. Spillers (1987, p. 74) argues that the state of being kinless ‘is an enforced state of a breach’; a radical cut in the way in which meaning is generated. What comes to mind is Karen Barad’s (2007, p. 82, 330) concept of an onto-political ‘cut’, a boundary-making operation that allows articulating the reality in terms of separation. According to Barad, relations precede both objects and subjects; co-becoming is ontologically primary. As I see it, the cut is a form of ontological and epistemic violence—an incision, but, importantly, thinking-with Spillers historicises it. For Spillers, the Middle Passage of the Transatlantic Slave Trade is the breach. In this way, ‘s/kin’ is haunted by the slave ship as a breach, or, the moment of the breakdown of all meaning.

Black studies scholars rethink kinship as a fundamental category that roots the subject in the world (see Spillers, 1987; Hartman, 2007; Sharpe, 2016a). I understand kinship as more than the relationships established through biological or conventional family ties. It is a condition of being: kinships fasten the subject to the fabric of reality, so that being denied the recognition of one’s kinship crosses out the world of relations that makes and supports a human being in the world. Contrary to making kin as a relational process in which one is being recognised as ‘in the fold’, to render someone ‘kinless’ is to deliberately unrecognise and/or break their worldly attachments (that is, being somebody to someone). One displaced person in a refugee holding facility in Lithuania resisted what I refer to as the state of kinlessness in the following way: ‘I do not want to die in a place where nobody knows me’ (Wołkanowska-Kołodziej, 2021).

Kinship structures are not just family arrangements, but, in the psychoanalytic tradition, they underpin the symbolic order. The father’s name organises the rules of filiation and legitimacy, determining who inherits a name and property. It spells out who is recognised as kin:

‘Family,’ as we practice and understand it ‘in the West’—the vertical transfer of a bloodline, of a patronymic, of titles and entitlements, of real estate and the prerogatives of ‘cold cash,’ from fathers to sons and in the supposedly free exchange of affectional ties between a male and a female of his choice—becomes the mythically revered privilege of a free and freed community. (Spillers, 1987, p. 74, emphasis in original)

The titular American grammar in Spillers’ essay renders the flesh of the Black people kidnapped from the African continent defaced and culturally unmade—symbolically father-less. Their bodies, suspended in the oceanic of the Middle Passage, are not accounted for nor differentiated (ibid., p. 72). They are brutally extracted from their relations of kinship, unrecognised in their belonging and deprived of their proper name. In the ‘American grammar book’, kinlessness is historically effected by the system of slavery which replaced relations of belonging with property relations (‘“kinship” loses meaning, since it can be invaded at any given and arbitrary moment by the property relations’ [ibid., p. 74, emphasis in original]). An enslaved person does not belong to themselves. Their children are not theirs either. The rule of partus sequitur ventrem, ‘the child follows the belly’, established that children of an enslaved woman inherit her status, turning a mother’s child into a master’s property—a thing.

In consequence, Spillers (ibid., p. 77) tells us, the descendants of enslaved individuals are dislocated in the symbolic order of filiations, they do not fit into the European, psychoanalytic family triangulation. To illustrate, Spillers offers a powerful critique of the infamous 1965 Moynihan report, which insisted on ‘the white family’, in which the father transmits property and social position to his children, as the normative societal ideal. The Report pathologises Black mother-led households and views Black women as a threat to the established patriarchal order. They represent ‘the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to “name”)’ (ibid., p. 80). This pathologisation of the Black family continues today in daily lived experiences of the Black diaspora such as overpolicing, criminalisation or biased perception of Black parents as neglectful (Sharpe, 2016a).

Spillers makes a critical intervention in the psychoanalytic tradition according to which the Name of the Father introduces the subject into the realm of meaning. The ‘American grammar’ is ‘a rupture and a radically different kind of cultural continuation’ (Spillers, 1987, p. 68) that establishes the symbolic order in and through a particular historical context of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and chattel slavery. ‘American grammar’ traces back the origins of contemporary racial capitalism and its racialised (b)orderings back to the movements of the triangular trade: ‘The child follows the belly. The modern world follows the belly’ (Hartman, 2016, p. 166).

This passage from Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016a) is useful to articulate the preconditions of any contemporary European grammar, as I understand it:

In the wake, the semiotics of the slave ship continue: from the forced movements of the enslaved to the forced movements of the migrant and the refugee, to the regulation of Black people in North American streets and neighborhoods, to those ongoing crossings of and drownings in the Mediterranean Sea, to the brutal colonial reimaginings of the slave ship and the ark; to the reappearances of the slave ship in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, and the school. (ibid., p. 21, emphasis mine)

As I read it, ‘the wake’ is a totality and an irrevocable breach that prevents any return to what was ‘before’. From this perspective, the wake is not only an American problem. Its logic lives on in the border regimes in CEE, even if each of them has a different, specific grammar. Hence, the kinlessness of the enslaved individuals in the Americas is not the same kinlessness of the people on the move in twenty-first-century Europe. For instance, migration scholars, such as Nicholas De Genova, Glenda Garelli and Martina Tazzioli (2018), Shahram Khosravi (2007) and Ethemcan Turhan and Marco Armiero (2017), make a point of highlighting the agency of today’s border crossers in deciding to set out on a journey and actively challenging the existing border regimes. The earlier suggested idea of ‘s/kin’ functions as a pointer signalling a link between violent border-making practices in the Belarusian–Polish frontier and the racialised hierarchies established by European colonialism, slavery and imperialism and their lasting legacy. Rethinking kinship is a way to trace back that relationship.

‘and mother (like family) is a relation that loses meaning’ ¹¹

At the level of a basic grammatical unit—a sentence—grammatical rules establish the relations between its elements. Meaning is generated relationally, that is, it emerges from these relations. In a more metaphysical sense which I suggest here, ‘grammar’ is the general onto-political field that charts all possible relations. Some of these possible relations come to existence, others do not; some are recognised, and some are not. Those that fall out of meaning are, as per Christina Sharpe (2016a, pp. 75–77), ‘anagrammatical’.

I call ‘the Polish grammar’ a particular cultural formation that imbues bodies with meaning. It is both general and specific. It is specific to the power arrangements in which the nation’s body is bordered by particularly gendered, sexualised and racialised constructions of kin and kinship. They are at work in the Polish–Belarusian border crisis. It is general in that it emerges with, from and after European colonisation, slavery and imperialism.

mother, body, border. first cut: Judith’s story

A testimony given to a journalist by a young Congolese woman named Judith (Boczek, 2021) exemplifies a process of racialised unrecognition of kinship. Judith was one of the border crossers who reached the European Union via the Belarusian route. Border officers apprehended her in Poland and forced her back to Belarus. They grabbed Judith by the arms and legs and threw her over the razor fence, despite her repeatedly telling them that she was pregnant. A couple of days later, still in the woodlands and without access to proper medical help, Judith went through a miscarriage.

Spillers (1987, p. 67) argues that part of the process of rendering kinless is the ungendering of Black bodies. They are not male or female, but cargo. The female flesh becomes ‘ungendered’, that is, ejected from the dominant symbolic order. Contemporary European border regimes are a site where such violent rejection continues: according to a witness, border guards threw Judith ‘like a trash bag’ across the border fence (Boczek, 2021).

Judith’s story is not incidental. In fact, it is one of many. A Syrian couple were stuck in Belarus, running out of options. They were expecting their first baby and the woman was bleeding heavily. Eventually, they decided to part ways and he continued the journey alone (private conversation, November 2021). A Kurdish woman gave birth in the remote woodlands, where she was found lying on a sleeping bag drenched in blood, a new-born child by her side. ¹² Avin Irfan Zahir, a Kurdish woman who had clandestinely crossed the border with her husband, brother-in-law and five children, succumbed to severe hypothermia in a Polish hospital days after her child was delivered as a stillborn. ¹³

The womb is no longer life-giving, as border violence turns it into an open wound where miscarriage (of a foetus, of justice) takes place. Christina Sharpe (2016a, p. 56) recounts the horrific discovery made in 2013 on the coast of Lampedusa, where Italian rescuers found a body of a drowned woman with her newborn baby still attached to her by the umbilical cord. Sharpe recognises the woman’s ‘incapacity to mother’ as a continuation of the ‘partus sequitur ventrem’. Under such conditions, the attachment becomes in separation (‘the slash’) or death: ‘The belly of the ship births blackness (as no/relation)’ (ibid., p. 74). Similarly, the border is calibrated to cut the relation. Importantly, Sharpe (ibid., p. 57, emphasis in original) adds that the drowned woman’s ‘incapacity to mother’ ‘will come to stand in for their crimes (of imperialism, colonialism, privatization, mineral and resource extraction, environmental destruction, etc.)’. The position of ‘standing in’ indicates that the ‘incapacity to mother’ is a metonymy. It dislocates responsibility. From this perspective, the incapacity to mother denounces European crimes (‘their crimes’).

mother, body, nation. second cut: Izabela’s story

Not long after Judith lost her pregnancy, Izabela, a white Polish woman expecting her second child, was diagnosed with a nonviable pregnancy (Bukowska and Lusawa, 2021). ¹⁴ The doctors decided to hold off the termination of the pregnancy until the foetus’s heartbeat had stopped, presumably for fear of breaking the law which bans abortion of malformed foetuses. ¹⁵ The hardened abortion rules came into force a few months earlier, in January 2021, after the Constitutional Tribunal of Poland (2020) struck down the right to legal abortion on the grounds of ‘severe and irreversible foetal defect or incurable illness that threatens the foetus’ life’ as unconstitutional. As a result of a delay in receiving treatment, the woman developed an infection and died of septic shock.

These are parallel sentences (here, I note that a sentence is both a grammatical series and a legal punishment). Izabela’s story exemplifies being forced—sentenced—to participate in the reproductive rebirthings of the (white and native) nation. Judith is not recognised as a (future or potential) mother because she and her child are not wished into being part of the reproductive body of the nation, unlike white, ethnically Polish children. Her story is anagrammatical—because, as per Sharpe (2016a, p. 76, 77), Blackness is anagrammatical, ‘putting pressure on meaning’, making ‘the meanings of words fall apart’.

Discussing biological reproduction under the rubric of kinship may raise objections. In fact, I would like to think of the ‘reproductive sphere’ not as limited to the biological reproduction of a species, i.e. mothering as birthing human babies, but rather in terms of ‘all things reproductive’ (Gedalof, 2022, p. 6). This includes ‘the social reproductive sphere of the welfare state, but also the capacity to carry out one’s individual and familial reproductive activities—to house oneself, to keep oneself and one’s family healthy, to make a family and have one’s familial/kinship ties recognised’ (ibid.). In a broad sense, the reproductive sphere concerns itself with caring as much as surviving. Nevertheless, my attempt to rethink kinship does not subscribe to the anti-reproductive and anti-natalist ethics of kinship encapsulated in Donna Haraway’s (2016, pp. 102–103) catchphrase ‘make kin, not babies’. Feminist and migration scholars (see, e.g., Stevens, 1999; Luibhéid, 2013; Chavez, 2017; Turner, 2020) have long studied how immigration policies serve the nationalist project to manage the ‘body of the nation’ by sanctioning reproduction by some and prohibiting it by others. While kinship is not limited to the biological reproduction of a species or blood kin, sometimes it is also about ‘making babies’.

the Polish grammar of belonging

In conservative national discourses, kinship is glued to issues of legality and political belonging. Filiation, from Latin fīlia-re, ‘to give birth to’, denotes both a relationship between a parent and a child, and a recognition of descendance that establishes belonging and legitimises kinship. In Poland, where the rule of jus sanguinis is followed, blood relations translate into citizenship status (jus sanguinis, Latin for ‘the right of blood’, is a legal principle in which citizenship is acquired by descent from a citizen parent or parents).

The reproductive function of the heterosexual family—its (assumed) ability to make new human children, who also become new citizens—plays a central role in the national project of reproductive nationalism at the expense of certain othered bodies being kept outside the fold. Sophia Siddiqui (2021) observes that reproductive racism is a structural component of European nationalisms. According to Siddiqui (ibid., p. 3), reproductive racism ‘marries the notion of reproduction, both biological and social, to new forms of political and popular racism in Europe wherein the family and breeding to keep the nation white and “native” are now centre stage’.

In Poland, the further away from the model of a white, Christian (Roman Catholic), heterosexual family, the less likely one is to be recognised as kin/ned. With the plummeting birth rates, fears over future national prosperity grow and straight bodies of citizens are either wished into reproduction through various governmental incentives for parents or forced to keep unwanted pregnancies. The latter is a result of a rollback on reproductive freedoms, particularly the aforementioned abortion ban. Concurrently, LGBTQ individuals are vehemently excluded from this nationalistic project. The populist rhetoric of ‘LGBT-free zones’ and anti-‘LGBTQ propaganda’ in Poland presents queer individuals as a threat to the traditional family and the nation. The following incident illustrates this: in 2018, the Polish Minister of Internal Affairs Joachim Brudziński made a complaint to the prosecutor’s office over participants of the Pride parade in Częstochowa (a sacred city for Polish Catholics) who had carried flags displaying the white eagle against a rainbow background. ¹⁶ The white eagle is the national coat of arms of Poland and Brudziński argued that the modified image ‘desecrated’ the national symbol. Queerness is prohibited from the sphere of symbols of national belonging; it is forced out of the nation’s symbolic orderings.

Where ‘white heterosexual family’ is the norm, gendered and sexualised othering is also involved in the reproduction of whiteness at the expense of Black, Brown, Romani, refugee and migrant lives. Jasbir Puar (2007) in her celebrated Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) avers how processes of sexual and gendering normalisation play a crucial role in racialised biopolitical regimes of security, border control and counterterrorism. Such rhetoric was activated at a press conference held jointly by the Polish Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Administration on 27 September 2021 to address the border crisis. At the conference, special forces spokesperson Stanisław Żaryn accused asylum seekers of being terrorists and sexual deviants. He showed the journalists bogus images that depicted acts of bestiality, paedophilia and terrorism, claiming they had been retrieved from detained migrants’ smartphones and were ‘evidence’ of their nefariousness (Sitnicka, 2021).

Puar argues that in post-9/11 America, the Brown, Muslim and/or Arab man and the terrorist collapse into one image of a perverted and pathologised masculinity. This pathologisation is rooted in ‘colonial fantasies of Orientalist excess, perversity, and pedophilia’ and ‘orientalist imageries of animalistic excess and bestiality’ (Puar, 2007, pp. 4, 68). This imagery helps to render people on the move unrecognisable in their humanity. The head of the Polish Ministry of National Defence, Mariusz Błaszczak (quoted in Szczepańska, 2021), commented on the material introduced at the press conference, which included images of a man having sex with a cow, by rhetorically asking: ‘Who is storming the Polish border, who are those people? […] They are involved in terrorist groups, they are criminals, disordered individuals who are a threat to Poland, to the Polish people, and to the European Union’. According to the colonial orientalist fantasy here at play, the figure of the migrant man is animalistic, bestial and abhorrent. Khosravi (2007, p. 324) observes that ‘the vulnerability of border transgressors is best demonstrated by their animalisation’, which here is foregrounded in sexual transgression. It represents ‘pathological spaces of violence that are constituted as sexually excessive, irrational, and abnormal’ (Puar, 2007, p. 71).

Sharpe (2016a, p. 75) tells us that anti-Black racism shapes the totality of lived experiences and subjective positions which, for Black people, are rendered anagrammatical. Being anagrammatical means that ‘meaning slides, signification slips, when words like child, girl, mother, and boy abut blackness’ (ibid., p. 80, emphasis in original). Much the same, racism collapses meaning in orientalist figurations, according to which people on the move, both Black and non-Black people of colour, become ‘aggressive migrants’, terrorists and perverts, or ‘young bulls with iPhones’. ¹⁷

The substitution of an ‘asylum seeker’ with ‘an aggressive migrant’ in such discourse is a particular racialised configuration of meaning generated by what I refer to as the ‘Polish grammar’. Bolaji Balogun’s work helps to understand how it operates. Balogun (2020, p. 1199) argues that in Poland, national belonging hinges on a biologically understood racial difference. He contends that ‘in Poland, the concept of race is understood through blood relations and often used in different contexts. For many, “race” means “nation”, “society” …’ (ibid.).

From a decolonial perspective, the racism of the borders grows out of a more deeply ingrown European racism and the continent’s colonial legacy (Ponzanesi, 2015; Bhambra, 2017; De Genova, 2018). Unlike many other European countries, Poland is considered ethnically and racially homogenous, mostly a country of transit rather than a place to settle. ¹⁸ However, this assumed homogeneity is complicated because it buttresses an image of a society that is assumed to be ‘raceless’ and free from racism (Balogun, 2020, p. 1198). The fact that Poland and other countries in the region did not have overseas colonies is used to deny complicity in colonialism as central to the development of modern Europe. ¹⁹ (ibid., p. 1196) comments that ‘this denial of racism has always been a myth of Communist and post-Communist CEE … In doing so, it conceals the specificity of CEE racism’. Contrary to this view, Poland and other countries in CEE produce their own ‘racial regionalizations’, that is, dominant regional types of racism linked to respective state formations (Goldberg, 2006, pp. 332–333). Balogun (2020) calls this situated racial logic ‘Polish-centrism’. Sustained by whiteness and Europeanness, it preserves ethnic homogeneity to maintain stability in the nation-state. Balogun writes:

Where ‘Polish-centrism’ has the most to offer is, in practice, the reproduction of race as a biological category, arguing that race and racism have not been marginal to the history of the West, but formed part of the configuration of CEE nations. […] the Polish concept of ethnicity is narrowed to those who share certain inborn phenotypes and blood, mainly whiteness of skin colour linked to common ancestry and the attitude of superiority toward the non-white Other. (ibid., p. 1202)

Following Balogun, we could say that Polish grammar establishes belonging via biological and racial understandings of the nation. It establishes kinships at the expense of the other who does not fit into the narrow definition of ‘kinsmen’. In the remaining part of this article, I will consider how to ‘decline’ this logic.

declining kinship

The syntax of the Polish language pivots on a grammatical operation of declension, which is mostly unused in English but is common in Slavic languages. I think of ‘declining’ from my situated place in a language other than English—my first language (mother tongue, father’s name) is Polish. For me, declension is a spoken reality. I sense a sentence as a pliable living thing, where elements are moveable and the order is susceptible to reshuffling. ²⁰

Declension:

the variation of the form of a noun, adjective, or pronoun, constituting its different cases; Each of the classes into which the nouns of any language are grouped according to their inflections; the action of declining, i.e., setting forth in order the different cases of, a noun, adjective, or pronoun. (Oxford English Dictionary, 2022)

I experiment with the idea of ‘declining’ kinships to map out the field of potentiality in forms of solidarity, care and what I term ‘kinwork’. When one is declining a noun or a pronoun, the form of the word changes to express its shifting syntactic functions in the sentence. A declined word is being cut (into a root and a suffix) and ‘bent’ to create new connections or to express different relations in the world or a sentence. Grammar, thus, contains not only rules but also the possibility of their decline (reduction, decrease), a space for declination (meaning deviation, a swerve, a clinamen) and declension (that is, all possible variations; the field of potentiality). I consider the possibility to decline (in these various senses) the dominant grammar of filiation by looking into examples of ‘making kin’ in border solidarity.

In social movements, rhetorical kinships abound. They are often used to elevate extra-familiar bonds to express political solidarity, be they brothers and sisters in struggle, community mothers, anti-authoritarian Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina or ‘Polish Grandmas’ protesting the country’s democratic backsliding. In the context of the Belarusian–Polish border crisis, groups who foreground refugee solidarity such as Families Without Borders make use of this kind of ‘family narrative’. Initially, Families Without Borders emerged from an online parenting community in mid-2021 but it soon grew into a country-wide informal network demanding humanitarian treatment and a safe passage for refugees. An important factor that galvanised people into action was the publication of pictures of a group of people on the move, including children, detained at the border patrol station in Michałowo, Poland in September 2021, taken by photojournalist Agnieszka Sadowska. ²¹ The group is surrounded by border officers in full gear, as they are sitting outside the station building, asking not to be deported. In one of the images, a small girl is cuddling a teddy bear; in another, a woman is breastfeeding a toddler. In another, a man is hugging in his arms a young, pale-faced and visibly tired girl, perhaps his daughter. Despite their pleas, later that very same day, on 27 September 2021, all were illegally expelled to Belarus.

Pictures of the ‘Michałowo children’, as they came to be known, circulated widely despite the imposed media blackout and a campaign of anti-migrant misinformation carried out by the public media. ²² Shocked by the treatment of asylum seekers, and perhaps especially by the plight of the children, Families Without Borders organised vigils and family-friendly protests outside the Polish Border Guard headquarters and stations in various cities in Poland. In front of the Border Guard’s buildings, the protesters’ children wrote in colourful chalk the names of the missing refugee children: ‘Where is Ayten?’, ‘Where is Aryas?’. Posters styled as missing child alerts were rolled out on utility posts and community bulletin boards and #GdzieSaDzieci (‘Where Are the Children’) was used on social media. Feminist activist group Mothers to the Border rallied in Michałowo to protest the deportation of asylum seekers, carrying pictures of the kids and asking: ‘Which lullabies would you sing to a child crying in the forest?’. ²³ The opposition asked at the session of the Polish parliament: ‘Where are the children?’. ²⁴

When (mainly) white Polish families, often heterosexually coupled parents with children, act against border violence, who counts as kin and who falls out of it? Who (else) is recognised as deserving of care and protection? Does this strategy simply perpetuate the privileged place of the conventional, heterosexual and exclusionary concept of kinship, or does it somehow veer from it? In a statement, Families Without Borders wrote: ‘Children should not fall victim to political games of adults. Their lives and health require special protection. We hope our letter will speak to the conscience of mothers and fathers who are responsible for making important decisions in our country’. ²⁵

This appeal to ‘paternal instinct’ or feelings, presumably shared across the political spectrum, is embedded in a symbolic and axiological reality that grants a privileged position to the parent—child relation ahead of other forms and formats of relationships (even if this ideological priority does not always translate into a material availability of social support for families or childcare infrastructure). In the group’s Letter, we are told that children require ‘special protection’ as particularly vulnerable individuals. ²⁶ In this way, not unproblematically, ‘the child’ as the central figure in the reproductive nationalist project becomes rhetorically hijacked—its sticky attachments to the project of national belonging are sequestered. The symbolic Child, once chastised by Lee Edelman in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), becomes symbolically repurposed. It is not fully emptied from its ties to the language of ‘family values’—the linchpin of reproductive nationalism and compulsory heteronormativity—nevertheless, there is an effort to unhinge it from the narrowly understood frames of who should be the subject of care.

The Families Without Borders’ different grammar places the imperative to ‘protect the children’ in the spectrum of democratic and humanist, rather than nationalistic, values. In this humanist paradigm, race is synonymous with ‘human community’ (Balogun, 2020, p. 1199), the universalised ‘human race’. For example, one of the pictures of the Michałowo children, which became widely used by Families Without Borders and which features on their website, portrays a little girl aged one and a half outside the border station in Michałowo. The image, based on a photo taken by Agnieszka Sadowska, is now a black-and-white illustration. There is no additional context to indicate how the child is geopolitically situated nor that she might be in distress or danger. The whiteness of the background appears colourless. It seems as if this toddler could be anyone’s child. Her image becomes a canvas to evoke an affective projection: ‘parental feelings’, care and empathy. The image of the young refugee child invites a substitution—‘think, this could be your child’, which creates a dissonance; she should be playing, fussing about food, uttering her first words, but instead she is being kicked out by armed border guards to rough sleep in a forest. ²⁷ One internet user expressed a sentiment that seemed common in the Families Without Borders’ Facebook group: ‘I look at my child and think about those kids in the forest, and I break out into tears’. ²⁸ A successful slippage between ‘that (foreign, migrant, refugee) child’ and this one, my kin, seems to pivot on the possibility to coalesce the two (even if only temporarily).

In this light, the protest chant ‘Where are the children?’ may sound like a call to establish temporary lines of af/filiation and to include people on the move in the family narrative. When Polish parents bring their own kids to refugee solidarity protests, they leverage their privileged access to the heteronormative orders of filiation and the elevated status of children and (heterosexual) family bonds that exist in Polish society. The intention is to reduce in strength the formative operations of reproductive nationalism. This strategy allows to reposition, ‘decline’, the normative investment in saving and protecting the children, in which the ideas of children’s wellbeing, best interest and future are linked to those of the nation. Through ‘declining’, the formation of bonds along compulsory bloodlines and militarised borderlines becomes less smooth. I compare this to a grammatical operation, in which a series of valorised elements—children, kin, (better) future—are being reordered through formative inflections to modify relations between them. This reordering generates a possibility of a different meaning.

By ‘declining’, I do not refer to its everyday meaning of ‘to refuse’. Instead, I evoke a sense of the Latin root of declinatio, meaning ‘a bending away’. The strategy bends away from, strays and reorientates the ‘protect the children’ rhetoric whose political and ideological power comes from its role in upholding reproductive nationalism and obligatory heteronormativity. Seen from this perspective, this is a reorienting movement, a swerve: reproductive nationalism’s overinvestment in the idea of ‘our children’ is seized and directed towards ‘other children’. While mobilising a conventional family narrative, Families Without Borders also signals frictions and cracks in this discourse.

falling out of meaning

There is a risk inherent in mobilising the ‘family narrative’ as it seemingly leaves out those who are not considered small, defenceless or faultless. In the discursive landscape of the border crisis, meanings erode. The category of a ‘child’ is not immune to this disintegration of meaning. Sharpe (2016a, p. 75) reminds us that Black children in the United States are routinely perceived as older than they are and thus never treated with the same empathy and care as their white peers. Similarly, words like ‘child’ or ‘teenager’ become suspect when they refer to people on the move. To illustrate, in Sweden and Finland, young people on the move are sometimes referred to as ‘bearded children’. This offensive expression refers to adult asylum seekers who claim to be unaccompanied minors and implies a grotesque monstrosity.

On 22 March 2022, I am scrolling through my Facebook feed and come across a post that reads:

My name is Majed. I am a citizen of Yemen, I am in Belarus, I have tried already to cross the border a few times, I was pushed back by the Polish guards, and beaten up by Belarusian soldiers. A month ago, they broke my arm. A couple of days ago I tried again, but my arm is broken, and I got arrested by the Polish border guards. I don’t know what to do. I am 16. ²⁹

Underneath, one of the comments reads ‘we should be on the lookout for these alleged “minors” from the Middle East. There was this guy in Berlin once, who claimed he was 15, they checked his papers, turns out he was 27’.

For racialised people in Europe, kinship is, per Sharpe (2016a), anagrammatical, and a child is never just an (innocent) child. Sharpe (ibid.) discusses the cases of victimisation and shooting of Black people in the United States, to show how words fall out of meaning. Under racist grammatics, meaning decays:

We see again and again how, in and out of the United States …, girl doesn’t mean ‘girl’ but, for example, ‘prostitute’ or ‘felon,’ boy doesn’t mean ‘boy,’ but ‘Hulk Hogan’ or ‘gunman,’ ‘thug’ or ‘urban youth.’ We see that mother doesn’t mean ‘mother’, but ‘felon’ and ‘defender’ and/or ‘birther of terror’ … We see that child is not ‘child’ … As the meanings of words fall apart, we encounter again and again the difficulty of sticking the signification. (ibid., pp. 76–77, emphasis in original)

In this light, the question ‘Where are the children?’ acquires a different dimension. In the Polish migration context, children become an element in discursive battles. According to the Polish Border Guard and government officials, children serve as a tool in the hands of their manipulative and unfit parents. They are alleged to serve as a propaganda tool to incite sympathy or pity. For example, in a series of tweets, the Special Services spokesperson claimed that ‘migrants receive instructions on how to use children to try to cross the border. “Take the children, hug them, look dirty and tired”’. ³⁰ In another striking example, the Polish Border Guard put the blame for being pushed back on the border crossers themselves: ‘Polish Border Guard officers informed the foreign nationals of the possibility to apply for asylum in Poland … the parents declined’. ³¹

Families Without Borders makes use of kinship narratives to reinstate the meaning of words like ‘children’, ‘mother’, ‘a girl’. However, Anna Carastathis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi (2018) observe that family narratives, while used to evoke empathy or solidarity, are both binary and heteronormative. Consequently, they divide migrants into ‘deserving’ and ‘underserving’. Carastathis and Tsilimpounidi (ibid., pp. 1121–1122) write that, on the one hand, ‘“refugees” are represented as a demographic or cultural threat according to nationalist and fascist ideologies’, while, on the other, they are perceived ‘through framings of their own reproductive histories and futures, constructing them as fathers, mothers, families, pregnant women, or, in taken-for-granted binary gender terms, as “men” and “women-and-children”’. While the latter image intends to appeal to sympathy, Sharpe (2016a, p. 57) warns us that sympathy ‘does not mitigate Fortress Europe’s death-dealing policies’.

How to go beyond such conventional rubrics? Neither Spillers nor Sharpe aims to redeem or reinstate the family triangle, nuclear family, or gender binary. Quite the opposite, they seek radical social change. Spillers (1987, p. 66) writes that ‘at a time when current critical discourses appear to compel us more and more decidedly toward gender “undecidability”, it would appear reactionary, if not dumb, to insist on the female/male gender’. Sharpe makes it clear that the goal is not to expand or correct the binary optics. Quoting Spillers, Sharpe (2016a, p. 49) insists that ‘our task [is to make] a place for this different social subject’. Along these lines of thinking, I argue for a radical definition of kin as solidarity, rather than an identity-making process.

kinwork

In April 2022, I visited the Muslim cemetery in Bohoniki, a Polish Tatar village located some two kilometres from the Belarus border. Tucked away in a corner of the cemetery, there are graves—heaps of earth covered with green tree branches—and a simple white plaque to mark each of them. This is the final resting place for people who lost their lives on the journey to Europe: Ahmed Al-Hasan, Mustafa Mohammed Mushed Al-Raimi, Ahmed Raeda Abdo Al Shawafi, Halikari Dhaker (who was Avin Irfan Zahir’s baby) and ‘N.N.’—an unidentified Black man whose body was found near Kuźnica, Poland in October 2021.

Ahmed Al-Hasan was a Syrian teenager who drowned in the Bug River in a bid to reach Europe. The Polish Tatar community organised his funeral and prayed for him. One of the funeral attendees held a mobile phone with Ahmed’s family on a video call participating in the ceremony, physically holding their connection. This is not a moment of justice, but of grief and goodbye. A slash slices ‘s/kin’ and cuts life short, but the slash—the slit—is also a space that serves as a placeholder for stories of those s(p)lit by borders. ³²

Literary non-fiction author Svetlana Alexievich (2015, p. 303) commented on the task of writing about war, that ‘what must be reclaimed is the small, the personal and the specific. The single human being. The only human being for someone. Not as the state regards him, but who he is for his mother, for his wife, for his child’. Alexievich denounces the grand and heroic national narratives in favour of the personal, relational and intimate. Being somebody’s someone—being made and sustained through relationality—traverses and exceeds the roles of a mother, wife or child. Instead, it is a prism through which to see the this-here body not as floating in dissipating meanings but to recognise it in a web of relations that hold it. I read this passage side by side with Christina Sharpe’s (2016a, p. 52) comment that historical archives of the slave ship do not keep a record of individuals, ‘but columns in which subjects have been transformed into cargo marked in the ledger with the notation “negro man, ditto, negro woman, ditto”’. The ‘ditto’ signals the irrecuperable foundation of European modernity that must be reckoned with.

On Ahmed’s grave, rescue activists left a red headlamp, like the ones used by rescue volunteers during their night searches. ³³ The red light of the headlamp symbolically means ‘we were looking for you’. ‘We were looking for you’ is an (always insufficient) attempt to acknowledge a proper name and to denounce the ditto of the anonymous death. ‘We were looking for you’ is an intimate gesture, in which a prosthetic kinship is offered. Kin, in the broadest sense, is an active sense of recognition that we are bound up, implicated in one another—not only materially but also in terms of political and historical responsibility. It weaves invisible lines that uphold the body trapped in the thick of the forest or, elsewhere, in the middle of the sea.