Lives in Limbo

Once, the word ‘limbo’ referred to a dance craze and a popular song. Its meaning for today is quite different, and nowhere nearly as happy.

We can think of refugees with compassion but wouldn’t effective action be preferable? The people, who care for the plight of refugees, don’t often hold positions of authority. Or when they do rise to power, they drink a magic elixir and forget those, whose lives remain static, waiting. In limbo. Capitalism spends too much time determining our readiness to act. Or blocks it.

For nearly twenty years, I have advocated for and supported various refugees in different ways. When it was a matter of visiting onshore detention centres, my experiences could be harrowing. To watch someone constantly waiting, day after day, for change, any kind of change, is inclined to destabilise the way we look at the world.

Being a person, who finds it challenging to wait at a traffic light, or in a queue at the post office, I cannot visualise how I would manage day after day of nothingness. No work. No chance of education. No idea of when my life would alter. Just waiting. Or watching media grabs of other people’s lives all the time wondering, why not me. What have I done wrong?

Countless times, I have been asked, ‘Why do those women endanger their children’s lives by putting them on boats to come here?’ Women with no choice…