Amira Hanafi’s digital poem “Mexicans in Canada” consists of a script that cycles through two variables, demonym (name of the people of a particular place) and nation, within the larger phrase and the next thing you know, / there’s [demonym] in [nation]. Follow a link to the poem and you’re greeted with a first line in white letters on a grayish-cyan background. On the next line the script frantically churns through combinations of demonym and nation fast enough to blur. Click anywhere and it halts on a combination:

and the next thing you know,
there’s Caicos Islanders in Côte d’Ivoire

Click on it again and the text relaunches into cycling iteration. Click, it halts:

and the next thing you know,
there’s Kosovars in France

In Amira Hanafi’s words, the digital poem “plays with a sentence spoken by the comedian and actor Gabriel Iglesias on the documentary series Inside Jokes — ‘And the next thing you know, there’s Mexicans in Canada.’” Born in the United States and moved to Cairo in 2010, Hanafi’s work is frequently based in social documentary. Works like Mahdy’s Walk and Cairo On the Length incorporate geography and itinerary within this documentary practice. This makes “Mexicans in Canada” something of a departure in form. It’s not documentary, but it does reflect Hanafi’s ongoing engagements with place and migration.

In a tweet, Hanafi links to the piece and writes “Hope it gives you a fun minute to your day.” Light on context, in the ambivalent (and often vexed) space of the joke, fun, meanings kick up but don’t settle.

Perhaps the phrase and the next thing you know has less to do with the recent migration of a group to a place than with the speaker’s sudden capacity to see a group that has always been there. You could put this construction in the mouth of Islamophobic post-9/11 Western, NY law enforcement: and the next thing you know / there’s Yemeni in Lackawanna and Buffalo. They’ve been here since 1918. The largest number of individuals arrived in the 50s. The joke turns on the speaker’s blindness. In this reading, the you is I. And how and why does one know?

Or is it the “and the next” that matters because “next” points to a sudden cause for a migration of people? What would bring Caicos islanders thousands of miles east to Côte d’Ivoire? Kosovars to France? As the script churns, so does a whole hypothetical array of causes.

Or is the joke that the demonym is plural (not an Uzbek, but Uzbeks)? That one person in, say, a paranoid nativist’s eyes may become a population if they aren’t in their place of birth? Overreaction, hyperbole. Another joke on the speaker. And, in the ambivalent space of the joke, the reader’s unstable assumptions interact in unforeseen ways with the many potential political stances of the speaker.

As one keeps clicking, nation names and demonyms proliferate kicking up how one understands the way in which layers of law and physical borders affix origin and citizenship and often violently divide space. Then the rapid iteration eclipses that understanding.

And of the form? This script adds energy to the ponderous list poem by visually representing combinations of nation name and demonym in formation. The roulette-style generation of these categories helps one confront how the meanings of particular combinations are overdetermined in the discourses around them through the gut-reactions to x appearing in y.

I think of how I understand my own interest in capitalist supply chains and capitalist practices that create a mobile and rights-less transnational labor pool. Violent extraction on one end of the supply chain, my own consumption on the other. I think of the arbitrariness of borders, or their imperial and colonial roots.

Lingering with this piece longer in Buffalo on the border of U.S. empire, its visualization of the roulette-churn of categories can take on more ghoulish meanings. It enacts the interchangeability of people and place. The production of interchangeability rests upon the creation of false equivalencies between categories. Could Hanafi’s piece implicate the viewer as a sort of border agent having to assign and settle place and origin? Click, determination. It can bring to mind the violence of such systems in demanding legibility from and enforcing criteria upon migrants. It can bring to mind agencies like ICE that remain utterly unaccountable and whose actions, cruel in principal, are often crueler in practice such that they seem capricious, random, divorced from rational justice, or, through the lenses of indigenous historians such as Nick Estes or Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, the continuation of the practices of a white-supremacist settler state. We might even think of this in terms of geography: transfers of migrants across the archipelago of prisons far from their families and support networks. We might think of this in terms of the fact that many individuals experience deportation as exile from their home country, the United States, into utterly unknown territory. The United States’ determination of origin for an individual differs from their lived experience. And the next thing you know, there’s Americans in Cambodia, El Salvador, Nigeria.

Returning to Hanafi’s intention of “a fun minute,” the piece also reveals the expansiveness of the world, its multi-polar nature, and its dizzying array of peoples. No combination I hit upon contained the United States or Americans. There’s pleasure in that. Internet searching some of the names, makes me understand that I know less than zero about the multitude of nations in Oceania and Africa. Individual combinations and their accumulation may call the reader to listen for new frames of relation between peoples and places.

“And the Next Thing You Know” is a pataphysical proposition in this world of hardening borders: what would it take for people to have that freedom of movement—to be somewhere else, suddenly, particularly when it reverses colonial and imperial enclosures of land and people? No cops. No ICE. No jails. No laws that give them such terrible power. And what does it mean that we’re stuck in the grammar of the nation-state, demonym? Hanafi’s script whirls on.

*

Joe Hall is a deprofessionalizing academic in Buffalo, NY and the author of four books of poetry, including Someone’s Utopia (2018). If you’re reading this, consider supporting the work of Black Love Resists in the Rust through a recurring donation.