Understanding Access to Closed Spaces: The Airport, Admittance, and Race
Guest blog post by Qazi Mustabeen Noor (Department of English Language and Literature, Queen’s University, Canada). Email: 21qmn@queensu.ca | Twitter: @Mustabeen_Qazi
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As an international student arriving in Canada for the first time in August 2019, I encountered my first experience of facing airport security in the West. I had previously travelled to some Asian destinations as a tourist and faced little to no scrutiny. I am, however, aware of the fact that my Bangladeshi passport is one of the weakest passports in the world, standing at the 99th position of the Henley Passport Index (“Passport power” 2020: par 1). After flying twenty-four hours, including a five-hour transit in Dubai, I had finally arrived in Canada only to realize that I had to go through another layer of scrutiny at the port of entry.
Hundreds of other international students waited for their turn at the Toronto Pearson Airport despite securing the necessary visa and already having arrived at the shores of Canada. We were yet to receive our study permits, handed over only at the port of entry. The air was heavy with palpable anticipation; somebody took an inhaler out in an attempt to flush the anxiety away. Many had already noticed the hue and cry near the front of the line — a woman with a child in her arms was in tears, pleading before the immigration officials. In such a charged environment, a fellow supplicant voiced a legitimate concern in an undertone, “Why make us come all the way here if they won’t give us the study permit? I mean, why issue the visa at all?”
I should mention that all Student Visa applications from Bangladesh and a few other countries are processed at the Canadian Visa Application Center (CVAC) in Singapore. When we apply, we attach a host of documents, such as our offer letters, transcripts, bank statements, and English proficiency test scores, as well as our original passport. Those who receive the visa seal on their passports can board their flights to Canada, yet every international student goes through a second layer of scrutiny after painstakingly travelling this far, some only to be deported.
“Are they going to let me in? On what basis? How are they going to treat me? What are they going to ask?”
The anxiety and tension experienced at the airport are due to the fact that a large queue of people is waiting for an outcome — either positive or negative. The questions that arise in a supplicant’s mind look like this, “Are they going to let me in? On what basis? How are they going to treat me? What are they going to ask?” This, in a way, creates a crisis situation which can be termed “civil scarcity.” The international student is already admitted to an educational institution, some have also perhaps paid a semester’s tuition fee before arrival, they also have the visa in their hands, yet there is a sense of uncertainty created by security apparatuses. Almost certainly, this “civil scarcity” or crisis may escalate when there is a real-world catastrophe in the world. Two significant examples are the September 11 Twin Tower attacks and today’s COVID-19 outbreak.
Looking back at my experience at the airport has made me think about various aspects of governmentality and gatekeeping, as well as entry and exit into closed spaces. We all have a basic understanding of the fact that not all places are made equal; some are restricted to certain groups of people on the basis of a few set criteria. To denote a complex and composite form of access to any place, postcolonial theorist Rey Chow uses the term “admittance.” The concept of admittance characterizes the fraught negotiation of access to closed spaces, such as exclusive clubs for expatriates, gated communities, national borders, or the other side of the immigration counter of an airport. The nuance of admittance is threefold; the first one being “the most physical sense of letting enter, as when we are admitted to a theater, an auditorium, a school, a country and so forth” (Chow 2010: 58). This can be read as the foremost and most basic layer of gatekeeping to a place where everybody is not supposed to have access. A homeless child will not be granted entry into a high-profile private school due to the absence of his uniform and his contrasting shabbiness when compared with the students there. According to Chow, this first layer of admittance, i.e., the simple permission to enter, “governs a range of hierarchically experienced geographical and spatial divisions in the colonial and postcolonial world,” such as South African apartheid, racial segregation in the United States, and the various measures taken by immigration apparatuses to cast out “illegal immigrants” (2010: 58). I would like to point out that this first layer of admittance is sometimes conducted completely upon face value, especially at ports of entry. When Chow states that the person not admitted “bears certain marks of a group in articulation” (2010: 58), we immediately think of reasons such as the absence of a paper permit (passport, visa, etc.) or the somatic markers of race and religion, such as the colour of one’s skin, clothing, accent, etc.
The concept of admittance characterizes the fraught negotiation of access to closed spaces.
Now that an individual has crossed the first hurdle to gain admittance to a space, the second form comes into play which is closely related to acknowledgment and recognition from the granting authorities. This is a form of abstract permission which Chow associates with validation, “To be permitted to enter is then to be recognized as having a similar kind of value as that which is possessed by the admitting community” (2010: 58). This sort of validation can ensure accelerated entry into a closed space and may greatly vary depending on the unwritten rules of the said place. For instance, a Bangladeshi-American citizen may get easy access to the amenities of the extremely posh and exclusive American Club in Dhaka, commanding respect from the attendees who are US citizens of different racial backgrounds. However, the same person may be apprehended by airport security upon landing on American soil. Hence, in order for admittance to be complete, it is simply never a matter of possessing the right permit since “validation and acknowledgment must also be present” (Chow 2010: 59).
Chow then tells us of a third form of admittance, “in the sense of a confession — such as the admittance of a crime. Insofar as confession is an act of repentance, a surrender of oneself in reconciliation with the rules of society, it is also related to community” (2010: 4). Indeed, surrendering oneself to the airport authorities is perhaps the smart thing to do; it makes things “easy” for everyone involved. The racialized traveller is expected to offer themselves up with a level-headed resilience, answer every question no matter how sensitive, unlock every device that may have sensitive personal information; even a moment’s nervousness or ill temper can cost them their hard-earned status or worse, land them in a detention facility.
In A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand describes the feeling of landing at UK’s infamous Heathrow Airport as “apprehension.” This feeling arises in her due to “suspicious customs officers who flag my skin for scrutiny” (Brand 2002:75). She is greeted by an oddly familiar sight — a queue of racialized “others” also waiting to be checked. This “unnameable familiarity” is the group’s shared history of being colonized, being once a part of the “Empire” (Brand 2002: 75). An example of admittance in the form of validation can be found in A Map to the Door of No Return when the author notices the distinct behaviour of the airport officials at Heathrow: “He even smiles a genuine kind of smile not the quick smirk of my compatriots. He at least tries to disarm me and not overpower me. That is the test of true power” (Brand 2002: 76–77). We also notice her attempt to not play into racial stereotypes associated with the Black community while travelling internationally. She narrates how in Canada, customs officials, “take me aside after my holidays and examine my folded clothing… even after I have tried to dress in the least amount of clothing to allay suspicion of possible bags of marijuana strapped to my belly” (Brand 2002: 49). Her care over her clothing can be read as a conscious or subconscious attempt to gain validation in a compromising situation where entry can be restricted at any moment.
I would also like to mention the role of validation while forming communities and friendships, which Brand also experiences in Sydney, Australia. As, according to Chow they had similar kind of values, the author could easily mingle with her Maori friend Briar as well as Cathy, who belongs to the Aboriginal community. The three discuss race in their respective countries with “the same sense of derision, cynicism, and hilarious absurdity” (2002: 79). This solidarity became possible because the author was allowed into the world of Australian indigenous activism as an ally through admittance. Cathy and Briar considered her to possess the same values as them.
I shall conclude by going back to my precarious position at Toronto Pearson Airport, where the officials have just called my name into the megaphone. I gingerly walk up to the concerned official who is still going through my documents, asking me questions about my major and my intention. The questions were followed by compliments like, “Oh you’re going to Mac (as in McMaster University)? Impressive!” and “You’re a really sharp student!”, to which I smiled weakly. I realize now that the authorities were not only granting me admittance in the physical sense, but they were also providing validation in the form of the nice things said to me. Ultimately, a combination of both had made my entry into Canada possible and seamless. Unlike the restrictions on admittance experienced by many racialized others, I was able to pass. I tell myself that things will get easier with a better paying job, more respect in society, more education, a “better” English accent, perhaps a stronger passport, a dual citizenship. Like many others, I look for a solution to my personal airport woes in becoming gentrified, proximal to whiteness, more privileged than I already am. Does that not make the airport experiences of the working-class person of colour invalid?
Works cited
Brand, Dionne. 2002. A Map to The Door of No Return. Toronto: Vintage Canada.
Chow, Rey. 2010. The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation, and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon. In The Rey Chow Reader, edited by Paul Bowman, Columbia University Press. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/bowm14994. Accessed 13 May 2020.
