All the vista we cannot see

These five prose poems engage French migrant psychiatry as an ethnographic object in the scene of wandering. They draw from observations of psychiatric consultations and scenes of migrant life in Paris, following ways homelessness and asylum refusal move through migrant life and clinical encounters. Poem (I) reflects on a clinical interview with a mother separated from her son at the border with Turkey, her protective silence; (II) reprises the colonial present in a searing scene of four lifeless bodies on a traffic junction; in (III), the case of a homeless man nursing a brain injury highlights displacements in the shifts of psychiatric practice between idealism, pragmatism, and complicity with the political order; (IV) exposes gendered power in the therapeutic relation, in the texture of chase and negotiation; (V) details a psychiatrist's work to craft the seeds of hope for a young woman from Congo who has witnessed the killings of all her relatives. The poems question ethnographic knowing in the site of displacement, if knowing might emerge more humanely from the changed relation of an oblique view, and exceed the routing of migrant alterity within political and clinical orthodoxy. This exposes a vista of all we cannot see

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