Romantic Paris with its violent linings where lie bodies as if they had never dared to venture across lands, mountains, rivers, and people to penetrate borders impenetrable in pursuit of safety. Not life with all its glory is sought; just the hope to live. Not dreams of better, greater, bigger are had; merely the fight to survive. Not hopes of futures radically different from that conceived by colonial ambitions, which continue to take while denying those from whom all rights to life are taken. Where is the land luscious about which the poets rejoice? Afghanistan; the mystical. There is only war. War that devastates. War that colours our streets in bodies and blood. From whence bodies ran; to thence bodies return. Paris, romantic Paris, where bodies line streets as if they had never escaped. What hopes they desire? To live. Just to live. Of what dignity can we speak when even the basic right to life does not exist? Governments sit around tables deciding what is safe and where the undocumented must remain.

So, let us speak in honesty: Why speak of war when years upon years have passed that our young men exist unnamed, unheard, and unspoken of here, right under our noses? Here in Europe they remain and yet Europe speaks of the safety of Afghanistan the very same day when bombs and gunmen devastate an already devastated land of blood and tears. Let us speak honestly of the colonial violence of a system which strategically denies the young men any right to life and thereby to hope? Whose life matters? Not the lives of my kin, evidently, when the only place they can claim is the cold, wet, and piss-soaked sidewalks of the great European progress? Dublin Regulation violently acquires their finger-prints, imprisons them in camps in countries they do not get to choose, savagely discards them outside one borders into another where they must sleep with rats on modern streets of modern European cities. Dublin Regulation forces them to endure beatings, shootings, suffocation by tear gas – all in the hands of the police; that is, to say nothing of all the horrors inflicted by hostile people and vicious climates.

Europe desires to live in comfort and security; but, I ask you, does this not itself necessitate a secure and just condition outside our homes as well as within its bounds? Well, how can we have young men lining our streets with no access to a simple thing as a toilet where they can lay their waste rather than in alleyways and by trees, which exposes rich and poor alike to diseases? Did Europe not once experience the threat of shit on its roads and in its waters?

To live is the very ground upon which life gains meaning, but living comprises of the right to be housed. This is undisputable; and yet, here in the land of progress, development, and modernity, exist many unhoused while houses, many houses, remain empty. No-one comes to Europe after our homes, our jobs, and our women. Europe is literally constructed by another’s home, another’s prospect of work, and another’s right to life, so how can the other come here for what is already theirs? As long as they are denied, we can exist. How can we accept such a condition to life; more so, how can it be that we, rationally, accept this as progress?

Here is where politics meets creativity, mobility, and the theatrics of oppression in pursuit of effective rebellion across borders, cultures, languages, and over walls into homes for the unhoused. Here is where strategic failures of the system is translated to tactical interventions by the encountering of those who have been failed and those who resist the system. Here is where rage is agitated, passions excited, and revolution blossom…ing.