Januar 2021

For many people, things did not go as expected in 2020. Due to the COVID 19 pandemic, public and social media label it as a “lost year”. Forcing a pause to the business as usual, human responses to the pandemic also brought to light some of the mechanisms that cause suffering all over the globe – and its unequal distribution. In this blog post, I dwell on one aspect of these inequalities that emerged through a debate about pandemic politics in a migrant-rights activist group in which I participated in the context of my postdoctoral research in a middle-sized city in Italy. To do so, I will center on the above meme published by one of the group’s members on his social media account in June, evoking a combination of determination and exhaustion. 

One of the tropes that came up in the early “first wave” of the coronavirus, mainly through videos shared on Messaging Apps, was the incentive to understand the forced halt as an occasion for contemplation, and as a welcome break from a general sense of frenzy and saturation. The trope was picked up by the Italian premier Giuseppe Conte who said on March 24, 2020 (Facebook live video): “I am convinced that this hard challenge which we are all facing will make us better […]. This is an occasion to stop - to do the musings that we usually don’t manage to do, because we are taken by a frenetic routine, a frenetic coming and going” (translation by the author). Yet, being able to pause (in serenity) is a privilege that is unequally distributed along race, class, and gender lines. 

In the early days of the lockdown, our activist group raised attention to a long-standing problem that had become a health hazard: many of the people who continued to work in so-called essential sectors and thus secured the functioning of society were migrants. However, most of them did not have access to public health care nor unemployment pay because they were without papers. In May, the Italian government finally passed a legalization campaign (sanatoria) for agricultural and care-workers, presenting it as a victory over what is known as caporalato, i.e., exploitative employment conditions that ignore legal salary rates and working conditions by outsourcing the hiring of day-laborers to intermediaries. 

As soon as the campaign was published, our group met online to organize a manifestation. Right from the start, activists decried the initiative. Energetic Fatou, who came to Italy in the early 1990s from Ivory Coast claims: “We have seen this before. They did the same with the sanatoria a few years ago.” The campaign would only offer residence permits limited to a few months. Plus: the government had promised to abolish Salvini’s Decreto Sicurezza from 2018 (which was replaced by a less stringent law in December 2020). Now they are promoting this campaign as a victory? Anyways, the activists agree, as long as the Bossi-Fini law from 2002 remains, structural discrimination will remain intact. The law ties residence permits to work contracts, thus pushing migrants to remain in exploitative working conditions lest risking illegalization. Ibou, a tall slim fifty-year-old from Senegal, added: “This is state-driven caporalato.” Indeed, as employers have to pay 400€ to regularize their workers, they are likely to ask the money from their employees, thus reinforcing the bondage created by the Bossi-Fini law. Yousef, just as the others, is not eligible to apply for legalization unless he abandons his job in the metal industry for more precarious agricultural employment. He exclaims “We are tired (siamo stanchi)! Many of us have been struggling for years to get papers. Now it is under these conditions that they are offered. This never ends (non finisce mai)!”

One week later, four policemen killed the Black American George Floyd in Minneapolis. The date of our manifestation thus fell into a period marked by the probably largest civil upheaval the United States has ever seen. In this context, the sanatoria became just one more example of necropolitics (Mbembe 2019). Our dozens of speakers at the event at the city’s main square tied their grievances of racism and exploitation in Italy to the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and ongoing colonialism in their African home countries screaming: “I am a black man!” and “No justice no peace!” A few weeks later, one of the activists posted the meme.

The feeling of exhaustion in combination with strength is not new, nor is it unique to migrants. Memes saying “I’m strong but I’m tired” have been circulating in various languages since the mid-2010s. The slogan found its way on titles of blog posts relating to experiences as different as white Western motherhood, romantic delusion or coping with life-threatening illness. The popularity of the meme highlights a widespread affective experience that is inherent to the Western neoliberal requirement of being self-sufficient, enterprising and resourceful (cf. Bauman 2000). In other words, the meme effectively illustrates Elisabeth Povinelli’s (2011) “enduring present”.

Taking a presentist perspective on temporal dimensions of these affects, we can understand strength as a sensation that is intrinsically future-oriented: I feel strong because I am driven by expectations of the not-yet. Weariness, in turn, derives from the apprehension of past experiences becoming renewed in the present. For instance, in a high-speed train to Milano in September, I met a forty-year-old man with dense black curls who had come to Italy ten years before from Egypt. Doing unqualified jobs all along, the family father tells me that the pandemic has made life even more unmanageable than it was before. He never sees his kids and still struggles to make ends meet. His tiredness in the present is connected to the embodied experience of things constantly not turning out the way expected (not only in 2020), combined with the impossibility to rest and reorientate. His strength comes from his determination to live (or survive) rather than from the expectation of improving his lifestyle and values, as Conte promotes.

Thus, while there are uncountable reasons why one would post this meme, we can understand the particular motivation of the activist through the solidarity expressed with the Black Lives Matter movement. Their claims and disillusioned hopes are a form of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2006), because they know that even the abolishment of the Bossi-Fini law would fail to truly break the ever repeating social and institutional mechanisms that keep them at the margins of society. In the light of this, Conte’s suggestion of finding peace through pausing appears like a farce. Anyways, the premier never said that the pandemic challenge would make society more just and inclusive. 

Feelings of exhaustion stem from the history of racial discrimination getting renewed in their everyday experience. This is even more so the case in a society like the Italian, where the tackling of racism and structural discrimination in the present is impeded by the denial of racist pasts (Heywood 2019). Yet, until the past – where the exhaustion has its origin – is not addressed, there can be no justice in the present. The idea of a peaceful future hinges on a strength that comes from the expectation of positive change, and not merely from the determination to live. No justice: tiredness - No peace: living on the edge of exhaustion.