Sans Papier. v 2.0

 

A Lesbian Soul Trapped in the Body of an Undocumented Gay Man.

“…To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusion…” – Karl Marx (1844)

***

Sans-Papier.
by Rose of Tokio

2009-2011

Manuel wakes every day at five in the morning. He tells himself that it is a matter of discipline, a good habit he picked up from the hermit monks back in Jordan. A million years ago, when he was a person. Ahead of him is the long walk to Karlstad from the place his squat is located in a wooded area in the outskirts of town. An abandoned and dilapidated former summer house with a leaky roof, no water, no electricity, no heating. He tells himself that Jesus lived with no electricity either. In winter is hell to get out of the sleeping bag, for his hands and feet go numb after a few minutes of exposure. He has become an expert at dressing in less than three minutes. He picked up the technique from a military survival manual he downloaded from the internet: his REAL Bible.

The only way in and out of his squat is through a window left open by some indifferent former owner. The door is locked shut. He must exit and enter the premises only under cover of darkness and avoid silhouetting – just like the manual says. He tells himself he is a guerrilla. He has lived there on and off for almost three years. Except from some short periods when he is able to afford renting a student room for a month or two. He finds them on blocket.se. He is a good actor. Fortunately he has an ‘’American accent’’, since he was actually raised in South Florida. In order to avoid answering questions he pretends to be the language student he actually was once upon a time in Amsterdam, until the state revoked his visa and invalidated his sofi-number. He tells himself that at least he graduated.

Manuel is stateless and consequently ended up among the undocumented. He hates to call himself by the Swedish ‘’papperslössa’’ and prefers the French ‘’Sans-Papier’’. He tells himself that in French it sounds more ‘’Chic’’ as a lugubrious appendix to the very dry and definitive ‘’Stateless’’. He thinks about this as he walks towards the Stadsmissionen (where he can eat breakfast every weekday and use a shower once or twice a week), a long hour and a half walk. He must get there by eight in order to be able to get food, because beyond nine or ten nothing much is left. At first he felt sad about going in there, because he thought that he was taking food from the mouth of the homeless; until he realized that at least the homeless have a name of their own, an identity which he does not have. He is below the homeless in the scheme of things, so he does not feel guilty anymore.

Manuel works black. In 2009 he was hired as an apprentice by an underground business focusing on furniture, car and boat upholstery repair. It is officially a hobby; no taxes, no regulations, no union fees, no bullshit – just work for cash. He gets a 40% cut per set; when there is a lot of work life is good, when it is slow he starves. Boom and Bust. Sink or Swim. The guy he works for lived ten years in Idaho, so Manuel agreed to run the operation like an “American Business”; no two hour lunch breaks every 15 minutes and no three month vacations every two weeks, like Swedes expect;  sometimes no lunch. Just work non-stop from ten in the morning till seven at night, sometimes four, sometimes six days a week. Manuel tells himself that he is lucky, that at least he is not washing dishes for 100 SEK a week in some god-forsaken megalopolis like Stockholm or Göteborg; surrounded by criminality, pollution, overcrowding, desperate people and drugs. He’s been through that nightmare in Montreal, Amsterdam and Dublin, and vows not to repeat the mistake. Manuel hates big cities. Medium and small towns are more his size, there is less competition, he can walk or cycle everywhere (which kills the transportation cost); plus it is always best to go where everyone else does not want to go. That is the secret of his survival. To take what no one wants and go where no one goes and make it work for him. The summers are the good times. Manuel works landscaping ‘’on the side’’ for a guy from Peru who’s been in Sweden for twenty years and hires him to help. The work outside in the hot sun is heavy, but it is a cool dose of cash; straight cash. Manuel likes to call it “the tax free state”. He tells himself he is ‘’getting even’’ with THE BORDER POLICE. He takes pride in the fact that he knows more about the black market in black work than they do. 

A year ago, while walking back to his squat from his place of work, Manuel was intercepted by two teen age boys in a moped. They skid-blocked his path, and spat on a startled Manuel. The two boys yelled at him “we do not want you here”. Then they sped off. Apparently, they where young sympathizers of the NATIONAL SOCIALIST FRONT. Before this incident, Manuel often wondered why not just end it with a rope around his neck; he was haunted by the thought that his struggle was meaningless. But after being subjected to a race-hate attack, he now considers that every day he survives, every step he takes, every job he completes; is a victory of the will to live over race hatred. In anti-racist and anti-fascist activism he hopes to transform his struggle for day to day survival into a political act, and thus give it an enduring meaning.

Or so he tells himself.