{"id":34629,"date":"2023-05-10T08:00:38","date_gmt":"2023-05-10T07:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.redpepper.org.uk\/?p=34629"},"modified":"2023-10-20T20:06:18","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T19:06:18","slug":"review-migrants-the-story-of-us-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.redpepper.org.uk\/culture-media\/books\/review-migrants-the-story-of-us-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Migrants: The Story of Us All \u2013 review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Title:<\/strong> Migrants: The Story of Us All<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Author:<\/strong> Sam Miller<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publisher:<\/strong> Hachette<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Year:<\/strong> 2023<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a powerful thing to have the earth for your mother. This was, Athenians told each other, their heritage and their unique gift. Alone of the peoples of the ancient Aegean, wrote Plato, the children of Athens could claim to be autochthonous, earth-born, living always in one place, \u2018truly dwelling in the land\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also alone of the peoples of the Aegean, he added, they could claim to be free. The two judgements \u2013 the purity of their origin and the perfection of their politics \u2013 weren\u2019t unrelated. \u2018Other cities are composed of unequal men from all sorts of spaces,\u2019 Plato explained in Menexia<\/em><\/a>, \u2018and therefore their political systems are unequal… But we are all brothers born from the one mother, and we do not think we should be slaves or masters of one another.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Migrants<\/em>, Sam Miller writes that this was a lie. Metics \u2013 migrant workers, outlanders, living on the earth but not born of it \u2013 may have outnumbered citizens at several points in Athenian history. In a paradox later repeated across millennia, the burgeoning city-state found in them an economic buttress and an ideological foil. Even if their family had lived in Athens for generations, a metic would never be able to vote. Citizenship was heritage, a gift awarded only to the autochtons. To everyone else, the gates of the great assemblies were closed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s hardly news that Athenian democracy was exclusionary, of course. Gender and property were grounds for disenfranchisement, as they so often are. Miller\u2019s new history of migration proposes that another axis of obscurity and denial runs through our history: the animus of sedentary peoples against their nomadic rivals. Miller argues this animus was ignorant of their recent past, for most human life on this planet has been mobile, unsettled and\/or shifting with the seasons. Once, Miller writes, we were all migrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Agricultural revolution<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

That all changed with the invention of agriculture. Fixed settlements created civilisations complex enough for written alphabets, culture and trade. Miller thinks sedentary life wasn\u2019t always better than what came before but it gave people something they quickly began to value more than almost anything else. A home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So we arrive at the earth-born Athenians and Plato\u2019s autochtonous democracy, and also, intractably, the silent and unacknowledged masses of metics their system rested on. \u2018Sedentiarism\u2019, in Miller\u2019s charming neologism, was a jealous god. The fruits of settled life seem to inspire \u2013 or maybe even demand \u2013 rhetorical antipathy towards those who don\u2019t partake. To this day, migratory cultures figure in the stories of the civilised as savage creatures, only half-human, or as wild beasts and monsters, shadowy antagonists on the margins of our maps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Briefs for the defence are thin on the ground. Nomads and seasonal migrants made up a majority of human beings over most of time, but literate society meant, nearly always, settled society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018History books have on the whole been written by the sedentary for the sedentary,\u2019 Miller writes. Migrants have had a correspondingly poor press. Miller singles out the Vandals<\/a>, a migrant people from central Europe who found themselves ruling a chunk of Africa as the Roman empire imploded. Farmers, artists and theologians<\/a>; they\u2019re now nothing more than a metonym for mindless wreckage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

History\u2019s long shadow<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This sets predictable limits on Miller\u2019s work: after a certain passage of time, untold stories generally have to stay that way. Migrants<\/em>, as a consequence, is uneven. We survey population movements in and out of Britain over the years: a resume of the case for the Viking invasions; a rundown of the Neolithic discovery of America; the horrors of the last slave ship to arrive in the United States. Mythic migrants \u2013 Aeneas of Troy, Brutus of Britain \u2013 have only walk-on parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The industrial revolution germinates new forms of migration \u2013 and new oppositions. As the 20th century began, migrants found themselves on the wrong side of every political calculation: economically essential yet socially despised. World War I brought in passports<\/a>, militarised borders and a hysterical nationalism obsessed with their defence. The borders proved permeable, of course \u2013 they always do \u2013 but the hysteria stubbornly stuck around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Migration is politically explosive because it goes far beyond simple movement. It touches the heart of who and what we are<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wide-lens history dominates Migrants<\/em> but it\u2019s in a close-focus portrait of the actor and dancer Josephine Baker<\/a> that Miller excels. Baker migrated from the segregated US south: as a child she\u2019d survived a race riot. She recalled, many years and thousands of miles later, how she \u2018ran across a bridge to escape the rednecks, the white people killing and beating\u2026 I have been running ever since.\u2019 She ran all the way to Paris, where, in the 1920s, she found a job as an actor and dancer, and a home. Freed from Jim Crow, Baker felt \u2018liberated in Paris\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baker tried to bring her own experience of liberation to the world: adopting children from all races, from all over the world, and bringing them back to her home in the south of France. Miller is not entirely comfortable with Baker\u2019s \u2018rainbow tribe\u2019 \u2013 her project reproduced too many of the values it nominally opposed \u2013 but he\u2019s enraptured by what it represents. A practical utopia; an attempt to reimagine our roots, as the fluid, mobile things they truly are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Identity and belonging<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Miller himself knows identity\u2019s appurtenances (genes, heritage, family and ethnic histories) are always contingent. None of that abates his desire for it. \u2018I\u2019ve never really felt at home in England, as if I didn\u2019t belong there,\u2019 he writes. He surmises \u2018that I was born into the wrong nation\u2019. He\u2019s what George Steiner called a luftmensch, the common culprit-victim of modernity, resident everywhere, nowhere at home. His own travels \u2013 migrating, swallow-light, across the globe for work \u2013 provide solace but no solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miller sets out with a clear purpose: to unpick harmful myths about migration. First among them is that migration is something unnatural, an injection of strife and confusion into settled body politics \u2013 in Plato\u2019s Athens or Farage\u2019s Britain. Migration, forced and unforced, out of need or avarice or plain curiosity, is above anything else ordinary. And everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as Migrants<\/em> goes on \u2013 and Miller retraces the migrations that made him \u2013 it becomes evident that the effort, if not wasted, is attachment to sedentary life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Migration may not have changed much but we have. There\u2019s a metic in every Athenian, now; an autochthonous nostalgic in every luftmensch. The most footloose traveller secretly longs for home. Yet despite unprecedented change, the truth remains: the future is what we make of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article first appeared in issue #239, Spring 2023, Flight, Fight, Remain.<\/em> Subscribe<\/a> today to get your magazine delivered hot off the press!<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sam Miller’s book reveals migration to be neither aberrant nor harmful, but an ancient and fundamental aspect of humanity, says Madoc Cairns<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":41118,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,1977,1863],"tags":[2755],"class_list":["post-34629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-migration","tag-madoc-cairns"],"yoast_head":"\nMigrants: The Story of Us All \u2013 review - Red Pepper<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.redpepper.org.uk\/culture-media\/books\/review-migrants-the-story-of-us-all\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Migrants: The Story of Us All \u2013 review - 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