By: Olivia Sherman, News Writer

Author and SFU English professor Stephen Collis commonly makes a pilgrimage across England in the summer months. These walks, known as the Refugee Tales, inspired by The Canterbury Tales, have occurred since 2015. They walk in solidarity against immigrant detention, focusing on the endless cycle of rejection, transience, and uprootedness immigrants face. To explain, Collis uses the term, “the middle,” to showcase the status of immigrants. He explains that the middle is “a space of almost perpetual mobility, where the go between — goes between — as well as the space of possibility [ . . . ] but we so rarely stop to consider what we are in the shifting middle of.” 

Collis explored the importance of the Refugee Tales in a recent lecture, Middle of the Middle, hosted by SFU. He described the “complete redistribution of life on earth,” immigration, climate change, war, and violence, while using allusions to Dante’s Inferno, The Divine Comedy, and his own family’s history with migration. 

The concept of “middleness” is central to Collis’ lecture. “Where we are is in the middle of a crisis, or smack in the middle of the intersection of several compounding crises.” He cites climate change, a staggering amount of displaced peoples, and strict policies that are “doubling down on even more authoritarian and nationalist forms of exclusion — at a point when planetary collaboration is most desperately needed. 

“There could be as many as 1.2 billion climate migrants in the next thirty years,” Collis said. “But it is not just human beings that are on the move: all planetary life is currently in motion, fleeing the rising heat, heading north or south, towards the poles, at measurable rates.” 

Collis showcased the connection between plant migration and human migration, despite its “less obvious partnership in mobility. 

“The nationalist who wants to keep the borders of their sacrosanct nation closed and the conservationist who wants to keep ‘invasive’ species out, and restore or preserve an ecosystem’s historical integrity, meet here at the frightful borderlands of mobility,” he said. 

Collis discussed the story of one returning member of the Refugee Tales, Osman, who experienced a brutal and tumultuous journey to make it to the UK. From his experiences, Osman said he often felt like “a stray dog among humans,” a common expression among immigrants.  Collis elaborated on this: “the processes of dehumanization are so difficult to counter because the very notion of the ‘human’ as a privileged category apart is predicated on the difference and debasement of the nonhuman.”

Osman often carried sprigs of lavender with him on this journey, which naturally grow along the coasts of the Mediterranean, the Canary Islands, and the Red Sea. “The entirety of Osman’s journey, from Africa and across the Mediterranean and Europe, was a walk through lavender’s expanding biome.” 

Collis tied in Osman’s migration with plant life: “Plants join themselves to people as much as people to plants [ . . . ] the point is to work with and within the stretching biocommons to which we properly belong [ . . . ] What is clear is that our fate is tied up with the whole of life — a new definition of the term Holocene: one planet, one fate.

“Whenever I refer to ‘human activity’ I actually mean ‘capitalism’ — the ‘human’ in this equation kept in focus in order to think relationally, one species with another. For capital, there are only ‘resources,’ human or natural, thus it is less a question of dehumanization than it is the commodification of life, although the end result is often the same [. . . ] Human exceptionalism got us into this mess, and it cannot, formulated in the same way at least, get us out of it.”