Mohsin, Defeated by nostalgia

We are told not only that movement through geographies can be stopped but that movement through time can be too, that we can return to the past, to a better past, when our country, our race, our religion was truly great. All we must accept is division. The division of humanity into natives and migrants. A vision of a world of walls and barriers, and of the guards and weapons and surveillance required to enforce those barriers. A world where privacy dies, and dignity and equality alongside it, and where humans must pretend to be static, unmoving, moored to the land on which they currently stand and to a time like the time of their childhood—or of their ancestors’ childhoods—an imaginary time, in which standing still is only an imaginary possibility. Such are the dreams of a species defeated by nostalgia, at war with itself, with its migratory nature and the nature of its relationship to time, screaming in denial of the constant movement that is human life.

Mohsin, H. (2019) ‘In the 21st century, we are all migrants’, National Geographic magazine, August. Available at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/we-all-are-migrants-in-the-21st-century.