Alter-Nomad: On Xenophobia

I grew up in Tonneins, a town of 10,000 inhabitants bordered by the Garonne river. Jean Macé elementary school. Then Germillac middle school. During high-school, I moved to an even smaller town 10km from Tonneins called Aiguillon. I spent 18 years of my life in Lot-et-Garonne, one of the poorest departments of France in terms of GDP. My parents were born there as well. They spent most of their life there, yet they enjoy traveling. Travel made me hate the condition for a human to be chained to his birthplace, or to any place for that matter. It’s not that I don’t like my hometown, no. My heart still shivers at the memory of the green pastures and forests of Gascony. The sun has a different color. The smell of fresh dirt makes you feel alive. I believe Brassens says it better: “It’s true that they are pleasant, all these little villages, all these market towns, these hamlets, these localities, these cities, with their fortified castles, their churches, their beaches, they have only one weakness […], and it’s being inhabited by people who look on all others with contempt from the top of their ramparts, the race of chauvinists, the rosette wearers, the complacent idiots who were born in some place.” Where I come from is a part of me, but it doesn’t have to define me. I feel at home wherever the wind blows We are all born somewhere, it doesn’t define us.

Globalization generates more flexibility and more freedom, but also cultural homogenization. Traveling is adapting your daily routine to local customs, not the other way around. Travel does not make you, it undoes you. A life of travel is a community life where exchange creates social aggregation. Meeting new people is confronting your identity to others: “travel starts where beliefs stop”. It’s facing the foreign to be less foreign to yourself, to fight xenophobia - the fear of others. Discovering new cultures is not an easy thing: “Probably it is harder to reinvent life rather than inventing another one”. A beautiful journey asks of its actors to “break the chains that place and fix people in a given identity in order to assign them to a belonging”: a movement toward others, a change of identity that makes us better humans. We all aspire to reach a better place in life. Yet, we fear change, even when we need it. People who want to change the world rarely do it, because we seldom question our own situations, our own identity. We enjoy being fixed in an identity. We need labels because they simplify complex entities, just like words are an attempt at describing a reality we do not fully understand. Similarly, we tend to simplify the world we live in, because we cannot fully express it. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand. I don’t want to be tied down by dogmas. I seek truth. Where are you now? Why are you here? What prevents you from being somewhere else?

Welcoming moving populations repulses the sedentary. Anti-migrant politic figures understood it well, but we should not forget empowering diversity will lead us to a brighter future. Traveling is understanding. When you travel, you expect locals to treat you well. You expect hospitality. Hospitality is a value of the historical nomad. I was still a child when my parents took my brother and me to Morroco for a humanitarian trip. They had to deliver goods to a local organization. We encountered a Tuareg named Saïd in Essaouira. I don’t remember much of this summer, but I can never forget Saïd taking us to the bazaar to eat chickpeas. It felt like home. I made friends of the same age. We would play football in the streets and drink hot mint tea. We were living in a van and would visit occasionally. The universal Golden Rule is to treat others as you would like to be treated. The global migrant crisis is a complex issue but it’s the duty of the Northern countries to take the matter in their hands. Conscious travel is the first step toward becoming a global citizen.