Migration and water metaphors

“People don’t flood, and people don’t flow. People migrate, they move, they arrive, they pass through, they travel”.†

Listening this morning to the radio reports of the tens of thousands of Moroccans crossing the border into the North African Spanish "possession", aka "enclave", of Ceuta – which in reality is a left-over colony – I was impelled to write this blogpost. It's something I have written about before, but it bears repeating. As I always say to my students, it's not because you've made a breakthrough or think you've said the last word about an ideological shibboleth that you can sit back assuming the job is done. In interventionist academic work, the intervention needs to be continuous.
For some thirty years, I have been studying the discourse on racism and metaphors relating to water. My first text on the "Inundation metaphor" was in Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers (Duke UP, 1996): Chapter 7  "Fear of Drowing: Pure nations, hybrid bodies, excluded cultures".* Here's an extract:
"Unwanted immigrants of colour everywhere have frequently been described as "pouring in," "swamping," "flooding in," as coming in "tides" and "waves." In the [September 29, 1854] New York Tribune editorial, the phobia of death by drowning in an alien and unclean fluid is invoked. The metaphor alludes to an allied and recurrent image typical of this racist discourse, that of the fear of contamination, the terror of being made unclean by the filthy and sick. In Klaus Theweleit's 1987 study of the construction of the fascist, racist narrative which would be concretized in Germany's Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, in which the flood is the red flood of bolshevism, "a kind of ocean that surges on in waves, inundating and engulfing," he isolates the power of the inundation metaphor in a discourse of hate which was, of course, quintessentially racist."
Anti-immigrant, racist discourse is present in multifarious texts. I recall when I was a child in the 1960s seeing an elaborate racist, anti-black ditty which someone had written down. It intimated that black people were coming to England to scrounge on the white people's welfare state. I can recall one line clearly: "They come here and wash in Tide." There was a play on the word "tide" since "Tide" was, and still is, a popular brand of laundry detergent. There was the implication not only that the Other was entering the country illicitly at the country's seaboard, and thus uncontrolled and in great numbers, but also that s/he was  unused to washing and ignorant as to the difference between toilet soap and clothes washing detergent. This made the immigrant not only an object of derision, but someone ultimately unassimilable.
In my academic work, I have focused in particular on the press, from late nineteenth-century California to present-day Europe. Today the targets are Moroccans, and following the recent crossing of tens of thousands of migrants from Morocco to Ceuta, the media have once again trotted out their repertoire of clichés, associating human beings seeking a chance to live – rather than merely to survive – with dangerous waters that threaten to overwhelm Europe. This comparison between the movement of people and that of waves and ‘human tides’ has been going on for several centuries. Journalists, even so-called 'serious journalists' repeat this suite of metaphors without giving it a second thought. Is this a shortcut born of laziness, or an unconscious adherence to a dominant racist narrative? On the positive side, for the past ten years or so, I've been gratified to see that not only academic authors but also American public radio stations have taken note of my comments on this subject; at least, it's a start.
In whichever language and on whichever continent you get your news, I'm sure that journalists are using a variation on the inundation metaphor to describe current migration stories. It's easy to let these things go, but we should all call out these instances of easy recourse to racist metaphors whether employed consciously or not. That's what I did this morning when I wrote to the Mediator of Radio France to point out that journalists were employing the term marée humaine (human tide) to describe the recent passage to the other side of the border of thousands of individual Moroccans (you can see that message here).
So, don't let it go by. Do react.

* Troubadours is also available at archive.org : archive.org/details/troubadourstrump0000leeg
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.