"Emigration is no longer a solution; it's a defeat. People are risking death, drowning every day, but they're knocking on doors that are not open"
About this Quote
Ben Jelloun’s line lands like a verdict: emigration, once imagined as a hard but rational escape, has curdled into a symbol of collective failure. Calling it “no longer a solution” doesn’t dismiss the courage of migrants; it indicts the conditions that make flight feel like the only agency left. “It’s a defeat” shifts the shame away from the person leaving and onto the societies - sending and receiving - that have allowed hope to become an offshore hazard.
The quote works because it refuses romantic narratives. There’s no heroic diaspora mythology here, no tidy bootstrap arc. Instead, “risking death, drowning every day” is blunt, almost reportorial, a reminder that policy debates often launder suffering into abstractions: “flows,” “waves,” “numbers.” Ben Jelloun drags the body back into the sentence. As a poet, he doesn’t need metaphor; the sea has already become one.
“Knocking on doors that are not open” is the quiet dagger. It frames Europe’s border regime (and, more broadly, wealthy nations’ gatekeeping) as a domestic image: a house with lights on, refusing to answer. The subtext is moral hypocrisy - human rights rhetoric paired with hardened frontiers, selective compassion, and bureaucratic coldness. Contextually, the Mediterranean migration crisis and tightening asylum politics hover behind every clause, along with the failures of postcolonial states, corruption, joblessness, and climate pressure. The intent isn’t to scold movement; it’s to mourn a world where mobility has been reclassified from possibility to last resort.
The quote works because it refuses romantic narratives. There’s no heroic diaspora mythology here, no tidy bootstrap arc. Instead, “risking death, drowning every day” is blunt, almost reportorial, a reminder that policy debates often launder suffering into abstractions: “flows,” “waves,” “numbers.” Ben Jelloun drags the body back into the sentence. As a poet, he doesn’t need metaphor; the sea has already become one.
“Knocking on doors that are not open” is the quiet dagger. It frames Europe’s border regime (and, more broadly, wealthy nations’ gatekeeping) as a domestic image: a house with lights on, refusing to answer. The subtext is moral hypocrisy - human rights rhetoric paired with hardened frontiers, selective compassion, and bureaucratic coldness. Contextually, the Mediterranean migration crisis and tightening asylum politics hover behind every clause, along with the failures of postcolonial states, corruption, joblessness, and climate pressure. The intent isn’t to scold movement; it’s to mourn a world where mobility has been reclassified from possibility to last resort.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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