Inspired by Plàsi's song Far From Home, Gabriel Ndayishimiye, in his uncompromising critique of exile's structural foundations, refuses both the sentimental consolations of nostalgia and the moralizing grammar of resilience so often deployed to make displacement palatable to the global conscience. His critique is an exposure of exile as a mechanism of power, a terrain where sovereignty and abandonment converge in the management of human mobility.
He argues, there is no singular definition of a refugee. No universal condition, no shared script that can contain the totality of displacement. The world speaks of "the refugee" as if it were a coherent identity-as if exile produced sameness. But exile, like power, stratifies. It sorts, ranks, and selects. It elevates some and annihilates others. And in its wake, it leaves not one figure, but many.
Inspired by Plàsi's song Far From Home, Gabriel Ndayishimiye, in his uncompromising critique of exile's structural foundations, refuses both the sentimental consolations of nostalgia and the moralizing grammar of resilience so often deployed to make displacement palatable to the global conscience. His critique is an exposure of exile as a mechanism of power, a terrain where sovereignty and abandonment converge in the management of human mobility.
He argues, there is no singular definition of a refugee. No universal condition, no shared script that can contain the totality of displacement. The world speaks of "the refugee" as if it were a coherent identity-as if exile produced sameness. But exile, like power, stratifies. It sorts, ranks, and selects. It elevates some and annihilates others. And in its wake, it leaves not one figure, but many.