[00:34:34]
I have been through a lot in my life without having a father, you know, so sometimes [translator: Sanko is getting a little bit upset].
So sometimes, yeah… because I… It is really affecting me a lot, so, being without a father, I have experienced a lot, even me and my ex-wife, we fight, she thought I am not interested in things, but it is not that, it came from
[crying]
[translator: You need a break? […] The government is separating parents from their children, and I don’t know if Sanko said but we are trying to make another family reunification application, to his son, we have a lawyer who is helping with this, and this process can take at least one year, it is also important to say that this is a very long process, because there is a child on the other end of this story, who is waiting for his father, so this process is one year, if it will get approved. The lawyer says we have a strong case.]
[00:37:16]
I’m trying to live in this, with this, not in. I’m trying to reconcile the idea that while I go about my daily routine, they are sitting there in these rooms.
Rooms. I think about rooms a lot. The cover of the most recent issue of the magazine Apartamento is of Eileen Myles in her room[i]. The photo is warm toned. Her home is so weird. She lives in Marfa, Texas. The outside looks like the middle of nowhere, meaning anywhere in the Southwest. It could be Arizona, where I’m from. There are cacti and dry reedy yellow branches all over the ground. The house looks simultaneously like garbage and like a MOMA exhibit. I am so jealous I sent a message to the photographer on Instagram asking if I could buy a print of one of the photos: Inside her bedroom is a rusty bathtub, a bench press, free weights, a twin bed, a piece of wood separating the bed from the toilet. The walls are made of wood. No paint, no polymers that I spend fifty percent of my life looking at, excusing the wasted visual grafting as thinking or writing. On the cover, she’s sitting on a wooden chair with an orange cushion, minimal and playful, it is certainly Danish design.
I love Danish design. The bookshelf to my left is Danish teak. I bought it on Facebook marketplace. The table and chair beneath me match, but they are shams, not true teak, not the same level of craftsmanship. On the bookshelf, I have three books facing cover-out: one has Antonin Artaud’s face; one has Virgil Abloh’s name; one has a peach emoji. Rooms set tones, don’t they. The photographer never responded, so I will have to find another means to project Myles’ warm world onto my wall.
[00:39:46]
I just have a roommate who, I don’t know whether he’s sick or, yeah, I have my own stress, but he’s giving me muchmuchmuch more stress.
[00:40:00]
I am now in a Barnes and Noble parking lot, because this was the only place I could find a book by Simone Weil in San Diego. I could have gone to the central library downtown, but it’s a Saturday, and traffic would have added an hour to the excursion. Plus, this way I can annotate. And, Whole Foods is right here, so I was able to scarf down some rice, chicken, and garbanzo beans.
I’m parked between the Barnes and Noble and the trolley station; the giant, spikey, white, mormon castle is to my left, through my windshield. Some trees are to my right. It is an eight-degree November day. The Weil book I bought was The Need for Roots.
She says all human beings have an obligation to one another, simply because we are human beings, “it is the yardstick by which we measure progress,” (Weil, 5)
She makes the argument that humans have the need for rootedness, so uprootedness is a great evil. She caveats that entering a land in conquest can be a lesser evil if one mingles and co-roots, “this was the case of the Hellenes in Greece, the Celts in Gaul and the Moors in Spain.” Conversely, when the conqueror uproots the natives and proceeds to subjugate them, it is fatal, “the most extreme examples are when there are mass deportations, as in German-occupied Europe or in the Niger Bend, or when there is violent repression of all local traditions, as in the French colonies in Oceania (if we are to believe Gauguin and Alain Gerbault),” (33).
Saying I’m reading Simone Weil is nothing short of an admission that I’m starting to experience true moral panic.[ii]
Saying that I’m reading Simone Weil matches the tone of my internet search history from last night at 3 a.m.:
farm jobs near me
vineyards southern california
nayarit fishing jobs
trabajo pescador baja california
Saying I’m reading Simone Weil is pasting a sticky note on my forehead that reads Can’t Eat Because Even Sustainably Farmed Fish Are Fed Diets of Fishmeal Robbing The West African Coastlines of Crucial Local Food Source.
Food! Rooms. Food and rooms.
All of this is impossible.
[00:06:03]
I used to live in Copenhagen.
2011 was when I came, I asked for asylum in Denmark, so they gave me asylum, but later, I was rejected, so when I was rejected in 2013, I was sent back to my country, in Sierra Leone, so at the airport, they also denied me, they said I don’t have any valid documentation that says I’m from the country, so they wouldn’t accept it, so we flew back to Denmark, and before they sent me there, I had a letter that said the police wanted to talk to me, so I went, and they just arrested me.
[00:07:40]
Sanko’s roommate is mentally ill. The translator who drove him to the library (so that we could do this phone call) explained the circumstance. (Sanko did not need a translator, but he needed a ride, and her presence is always welcome, because she is an advocate for the residents and has helped me maintain these connections since I’ve been in the U.S.).
Her words on Sanko’s roommate:
“We’re talking sexual harassment, also towards me. And he’s like this towards everyone. It doesn’t matter who he’s trying to uh yeah, and actually, Red Cross issued a red alert on him for their volunteers […] and even that, and they still put him together with someone else in the same room, and now unfortunately this is Sanko’s problem. […] But he’s mentally ill: It’s just to say he should also get some help, if we think about it, he should never be placed there, he should be in a closed facility. […] We see that some people they come from closed facilities, they have done some crime, that is so severe, but here in Denmark, we don’t have much room in these facilities, so we let them out, even Denish people, and he doesn’t have papers, so they put him in this camp. […] And he’s not the first one, I’ve seen several people out there who should never have been let out in public. I’m just afraid that one day, we’re going to read about him in the papers.”
Politically, this is the perfect situation to bolster PM Mette Fredriksen’s anti-immigration platform. As random acts of violence accrue local attention and outrage, calls for closed borders will increase.
What makes no sense to me about Denmark’s being on the extreme end of anti-immigration sentiments in Europe is that they take so much pride in their response to the German occupation during World War II, when 7200 out of 78000 of the Jewish population survived. The day that Germany initiated an order to send the Danish Jews to concentration camps, the Danish people organized ships to evacuate them to Sweden.
[00:08:02]
I was kept in prison from February 18 to July. July 18 was the day they freed me, and they took me back to the asylum home, and before they freed me, we went to court, and the case said you have no country to go back to, so we will leave you in Denmark, but we will give you eighteen months to see if you are fit to fit in Danish society or not.
According to my translator, they were saying if within that eighteen months, if you haven’t committed a crime, then Denmark will see that and consider letting you live in Denmark, but if you have a crime it will delete everything, so that was what the court decided when they released me, but when they released me, they released me back to Sanholm […] I’d been living in Sanholm from 2013 to 2017, so in 2017, I got a letter that I needed to move to Kærshovedgård. At that time, I had a girlfriend who was pregnant, and because I had a girlfriend who was pregnant, I wasn’t going to leave and go to Kærshovedgård. […] She delivered on the 5th of May, 2019, so when she delivered, we applied for family reunification. I was turned down twice, so in 2022, we got married, that was 2022 May. […] July, we were at home, I was preparing food, because my wife got home from work, she was tired, our doorbell rang, I went and opened it, it was two policemen, they said we’re looking for this person, I said that is me, they said okay we were asked to come and arrest you, I said okay, I’m here, they asked me if they should put handcuff on me or not, I said no, I didn’t commit a crime, so there is no need to handcuff me, so they said okay, fine, but when we came out from the house, they forced me into handcuffs and they took me to the station, and that is where my court began the process, and at the end, they sentenced me to three years for not coming to Kærshovedgård, for refusing to live there, and when they sentenced me to three years, they tried multiple times to send me back to Africa but it wouldn’t happen.
[00:13:36]
One of the reasons he was denied reentry to Sierra Leone was because in his Danish paperwork, they included the information of his asylum appeal:
[00:50:26]
For me, I have a something, secret, you know, because um, I don’t usually say it just because when you say it especially to, uh, you get a rejection, so I was uh, I’m a bisexual, so for that reason.
Sometimes you don’t know the environment that you’re in. In my country, it was a very crazy thing [laughs].
When we came back, the lawyer who was doing my case said they didn’t need to include this when they sent you back there […].
In Ghana, I discovered myself […] I was practicing it with my friends, and that was when I ran away from Ghana. And when I sought asylum, I didn’t know anyone back in my country anymore, I didn’t even know where I used to live, because I was a kid, I was twelve years old when I left [Sierra Leone], so yeah, my lawyer who read my case when I came back, he said, “That country is even worse than Ghana,” according to what he read.
[00:54:05]
[00:14:17]
I stayed three years, two months in prison, so they moved me to another deportation camp which is also a prison, so I stayed there eight months, Ellebæk.
[Translator: if immigration already has travel documents, they can put people in Ellebæk until the day of the travel to make sure they don’t run away.]
When you are in prison in Denmark, it is better than Ellebæk. Ellebæk too is better than Kærshovedgård.
To me, because there are some certainties you can have in Ellebæk, but in Kærshovedgård you can’t […]
Because in prison, for example, the food they make in prison, if you don’t want it, every week, they give you money, they give you, for example, 750 Danish Krones every week, so if you don’t like the food, you can buy food from the outside, and maybe in the night, you can have coffee or tea, you can buy foodstuff and keep it in your fridge, but in Kærshovedgård you’re not allowed to have a fridge. When you are in prison or Ellebæk, you can watch the news, you see what is going on, there is a television with multiple channels, so you can watch a movie or football.
[00:18:30]
What also makes no sense to me about Denmark’s stance is that there isn’t as much of an economic drive as there is in the U.S. The Kærshovedgård detention center is state funded. The center is costly, and migrants are prevented from working.
In the U.S., our detention centers are for profit. Companies like CoreCivic are paid by the federal government to detain migrants. CoreCivic is a public company that is included in most venture capitalist portfolios (The largest shareholder of CoreCivic is BlackRock, Inc.), and consequently CoreCivic resides in almost every investor’s portfolio, due to the fact that anyone who owns S&P 500, i.e. stock in BlackRock, Inc., consequently, owns CoreCivic, in other words, pays Otay Mesa detention center, where a Guatemalan man just died (Roberto Jimenez Gutierrez on October 24, 2026[iii]). In the U.S.A., the cheap/stolen labor of the undocumented tallied up alongside the profit from their incarceration is an evil money churning mechanism. From tax, to death, to dollars.
What is a piece of this mechanism doing in Denmark? If it is solely psychological, and not economic, then the U.S. and Russia are to blame: Close-the-border rhetoric is a stew; in PM Mette Frederiksen’s address that I quoted in #2, she lumped the threat of Russia in with migrants from MENAPT countries and their potential dangers. (Reminder: MENAPT stands for Middle East North Africa Pakistan Turkey). Is a mentally ill person from Iran the same as Trump threatening to take Greenland from Denmark’s rule? No, but in the stew, the two are mixed together. The U.S. is, of course, one of the culprits to blame for the tightening of their borders. The U.S. is to blame for the tightening of the border forty-five minutes from me as I write this. The “U.S.A.” I still hear that man’s voice, from my first day at the center. “U.S.A…you fucked my country.” “Yeah.”
[00:33:01]
For me, the only thing right now I care most about is to be closer to my son, but it is impossible. I have him every two weeks, so when I pick him up when it is time, he asks me questions. One day he said, “I want to play ball but mom is working all the time, so why don’t you come and take me to play?” But I don’t want to tell him where I live right now, so I just tell him, “I can see what I can do.” But maybe one day, I can come and help him do that, those kinds of things, yeah, it is very difficult, I have been through a lot in my life without having a father, so sometimes, [translator: Sanko’s getting a little bit upset]
[00:34:56]
Ce monde est la porte fermée. C’est une barrière, et en même temps c’est le passage. [iv](Weil, Cahiers, v. III, p. 121.)
This world is the closed door, It is a barrier, and at the same time it is the passage.
The more I look at two things: what the residents say, and what I say around their words, I notice these patterns of reaction. My words want to nest in comfortable places, where I can leave the page feeling okay. One such place was when I asked the question: What is a piece of this mechanism doing in Denmark? I left and went for a run, because it felt like a strong gesture. I had made a point, that these camps are wrong. But as I ran, I recognized that I was being lazy, circling to easy conclusions: It is bad to detain innocent people. But then, why make it more complicated than it needs to be? Why wrestle with a question like, “Aren’t these migrants doing the uprooting that Weil calls the lesser evil?” Dealing with that would be a waste of time, to get lost in sludge that would inevitably end at the same, simple conclusion: It is bad to detain innocent people. And the answer to the question is obvious.
“Those who are uprooted, uproot. Those who are rooted do not uproot,” (Weil, 36).
Those who live in “MENAPT” countries are uprooted, for one reason or another, whether it be insufficient food source; political persecution; a war started by the U.S. in Iran; a genocide funded by the U.S. in Gaza; or general disenfranchisement stemming from colonial history that bleeds into the fiber of the nation’s LGBTQ+ rights. Those who live in empowered countries (with voting power), such as myself, such as Danish citizens, have no right to balk at the movement of peoples whose continent we throw trash on or whose continent our countries based our wealth upon (in Ghana, some of the castles that Denmark built for slave trade still stand; others have eroded[v]).
When Weil was fleeing nazi-occupied France, she stayed in a refugee camp in North Africa. From Casablanca, she traveled to New York, and from there to London, where she composed The Need for Roots from 1942-1943.
“The Hebrews were escaped slaves, and they exterminated or reduced to servitude all the populations of Palestine.” (Weil, 36).
Weil was highly critical of greatness. She related greatness with Hitler and his theories stemming from the science at the time that bred logics of inevitable violence. She mentioned another greatness in contrast, the kind of genius in art, which is impersonal and limited:
“The poet is a person, however, in the moments when they attain poetic perfection, they are imbued with an impersonal inspiration. It is in the mediocre moments that the poet’s inspiration is personal and then it is not really inspiration,” (220)
I am trying to bare myself and thoughts to show the mediocre moments. I do not wish to hide my daily routine while intersecting with these oral accounts, because in including it, I’m hoping to expose these patterns, to identify the loops that carry forward the uselessness of my life. And in baring my life/self/thought patterns, I’m hoping that I will calcify, and around my hollow, something else will show and pulse. What that is, I may be blind to.
Moral panic: is there something fascist about this sourdough I buy each week at the farmer’s market?
Moral panic: I open up a plastic container of pens on the freeway to write down a line for this essay and look out the window, a dead rabbit splayed but one of its ears still sticks up from the ground.
Moral panic: I haven’t been home for the holidays in years, the Whole Foods change in décor reminds me, but I called my nana the other day, she doesn’t want to bother me, she knows I’m busy, she knows I’ll call when I’m ready, she’s been saying this for my entire adult life, her voice is frail, higher for the first time, she mentions the idea of the second childhood, she credits her sister Josie, she asks how the writing is going, I tell her little updates, she is proud, she always is, because my generation, my cousins, me, are Mexican Americans who go to college and use our degrees, I can feel her smiling over the phone, it is her birthday, she says she’s happy for me, and all my success. Success.
Weil goes on to quote Hitler from Mein Kampf, where he claims that the planets and stars move by force, greater and weaker forces. He uses that idea to conclude that humans are organized by the strong overpowering the weak. Weil’s response: “How could blind force produce circles?” (221)
“Brute force is not sovereign here below. It is by nature blind and indeterminate. What is sovereign in this world is determinacy, limits. […] Hitler and his fanatical youth never felt that in gazing at the stars at night. But did anyone ever attempt to teach it to them? The civilization of which we are so proud did its utmost to conceal it, and as long as something in our souls is capable of being proud of it, we are innocent of none of Hitler’s crimes,” (221).
Rootedness, the title of this book is why I sought it in particular, I wanted a book to tell me to go home, and in a way it did.
What success can there be on any level here or there, Mette?
“In the sea, a wave rises, rises and rises, but at a certain point, even though there is nothing but emptiness, it is halted and forced to subside. In the same way, the German flood was halted, without anybody knowing why, on the shores of the English Channel,” (223).
[i] Weil, Simone. The need for roots: Prelude to a declaration of obligations towards the human being. Penguin UK, 2023.
[i][i] Apartamento, May 6, 2026. Issue #37
[ii] I should be banned from mentioning her in another piece of writing, but the Weil reading was influenced by: Chris Kraus. Aliens & Anorexia. Semiotext(e) / Native Agents, 2000.
[iii] Castillo, Andrea. “Immigrant detainee dies at Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego.” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2026.
[iv] Simone Weil, Cahiers (Paris: Gallimard, 1951).
[v] The Osu Castle, also named Fort Christiansborg, is still standing. Fort Prinzenstein has crumbled to ruins. My attention was brought to the fact that there are castles by my roommate Mimi Hattoh, a proud Ghanaian citizen.
#3 of Camp in Jutland Column: “Castles in Ghana,” by Sophia Acuña ©
