Words Beyond Walls: Je Suis un Réfugié

For years, Emmanuel Zessa fought for abandoned children, refugees, and women displaced by war and violence in his home country of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). “Mon cœur ne supporte pas l’injustice. L’injustice brise mon cœur,” says Zessa in his native French. “My heart cannot stand injustice. Injustice breaks my heart.” Using his musical talents and multilingual abilities, Zessa created a music video for CARITAS-Goma entitled “Don’t Touch Me.” The music video highlights the issue of sexual violence and rape in the DRC, particularly in North and South Kivu.

But being an advocate for the marginalized in the DRC did not come without a price. Zessa was forced to flee his home country, becoming a refugee himself. When he arrived in the United States in April 2015, our government welcomed him by shackling him and caging him in a jail cell. Zessa spent three months at Theo Lacy Facility and four months at James Musick Facility in immigration detention. He was released in November. Zessa is the seventh writer in CIVIC’s series of blog posts called “Words Beyond Walls.” These are Zessa’s words beyond walls:

My Confession

I am a refugee or one without papers, I am fleeing death and misery
The evil of this world means to break my bones and grind them on a rock
The evil of this world means to eat my flesh beneath the dust
The evil of this world means to grind my brain in the dark
The evil of this world means to chain my spirit in the shadows
I feel how dread invades my veins up to my eyelids
Tears flow down my face in deep discouragement.

I see all sins and my failures plastered to my conscience
The one institution in which I had placed all my confidence,
I swear to you, has betrayed me since I realized my own insufficiency.
Why was I so stupid as to place my faith in man?
His gaze cannot even control my emotions
Because what controls his spirit is cleverness without ambition
That means at all costs to break the heart of the vulnerable with severe reprisals
The detainees near me cried out the names of Jesus and Allah
It was a perfect confusion between God and hope
Finally I asked myself if it was actually depression or hallucination.

This is how my selfishness plunged me into an ocean of despair
Really my ability and my consciousness were no longer in harmony
But they criminalized me, as if they took pleasure in seeing me
In my despair my unfaithfulness and my corruption leave me ungrateful
And the angels in heaven are astonished at my behavior
All this stuff about the rights of man and human rights, it’s just a bluff
I myself forged my despondency and my imperfection
In view of everyone my body is in confinement
I had to be humiliated by means of my perversion
That’s when I felt true depression
Without any doubt I was a jaded recluse without motivation
Depression made me tremble and cut my breath short
Whispers and criticisms gave me a dreadful emotion
Bad circumstances whirled in my mind without pause
Nobody could tame me because I confused madness with wisdom.

Behind the question of whether justice exists, there is another question that has important physical and psychic consequences: Does human dignity exist?

Emmanuel Zessa’s poem was written in French and translated by Betty Guthrie, who visited Zessa while he was imprisoned in U.S. immigration detention. To learn more about immigration detention, join CIVIC on Facebook and check back in for more posts in this series in the coming months.