Denaturalisation Laws
What’s the opposite of naturalisation? Dénaturalisation, artificialisation.
Denaturalisation, loss of citizenship. My great-uncle lost Malayan citizenship involuntarily through denaturalisation. A member of the Malayan Communist Party, which confronted the Japanese Occupation and fought for independence from the British Empire, he was sent into exile in Maoist China. I imagine him and cadres of Red Guards rallying in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, after denaturalisation.
After the anti-communist mass killings of 1965-66, many Indonesians were de facto denaturalised, too, rendered stateless by the New Order regime and banished to Red China, Communist Albania, and the Soviet Union. During the Cold War in Canada, Jewish-Canadian union organiser and member of Parliament Fred Rose also lost citizenship involuntarily, barred from the House of Commons and denaturalised by Canada.
Besides Malayan communists, Indonesian exiles, and other political dissidents, ethnic minorities were also subject to denaturalisation. Following the Armenian genocide, Armenians, Assyrians/Syriacs, and Greeks were massively expelled and denaturalised by Türkiye. After the Iran-Iraq War, Kuwait subjected the Bedoon to denaturalisation, too, and an apartheid-like (non-)existence. Zainichi Koreans were also denaturalised, trapped in Japan and stateless, following the independence of Korea.
German-American historian Hannah Arendt points out that nation-states are the only entities to provide rights of participation: voting eligibility, work rights, government services, healthcare access, social security, legal status. Arendt points out that the refusal of nation-states to grant citizenship and official documents (no passports, birth certificates, identity cards, marriage records, naturalisation paperwork, driver’s licenses, residency permits, exit visas), and their ability to ‘denaturalise,’ drives a new category of civil death for millions of stateless people. Consequently, human rights are a limited response to statelessness, or the failure of nation-states to guarantee rights protection.
Citizenship rights arise through, and are dependent upon, the membership of a political community. By contrast, universal human rights apply regardless of citizenship, a ‘racialised’ concept and form of exclusion, and are owed to the human as a ‘natural’ entity. These universal rights prove unenforceable, in comparison with the citizenship rights naturally promised by nation-states to Kuwaiti citizens and Japanese people, but withheld from the denaturalised Bedoon in Kuwait and Zainichi Koreans, respectively.
Unnatural States
What’s the antonym of natural? Unnatural, artificial.
Artificial, product of manufacture. So-called Australia is a state forcibly manufactured through genocide of Indigenous peoples. A monopoly on legitimate violence, which in the hands of White settlers suppresses the resistance of the First Nations, Australia was founded on the British colonisation and invasion that from 1788 to the present fights against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and between 1948 and 1960 attempted to banish Malayan communists. Imagine three mining companies and a bank in a trench coat carrying the Glock semi-automatic handgun of settler police forces, between Redfern and Lingiari.
Evicted from their homes, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were effectively denaturalised, and made refugees by the Israeli military over the course of the 1948 Nakba, the year Malayan communists struggled for independence from the British Empire, and Zionist settlers strove for colonialism and genocide. Unnatural, illegitimate, so-called Israel is a political entity produced through ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Israel was founded on Palestinian people being treated, and made non-existent, like Palestinian nature. Like Palestinian lives, Palestinian plants and animals are being extinguished by Israel, an artificial and criminal settler-state that replaces Palestinian olives with non-native gum trees, and Palestinian people with European colonists.
A descendant of the Palestinian refugees who were violently displaced and dispossessed of their land, Palestinian-American student activist Mahmoud Khalil was illegally abducted and indefinitely detained by the ICE deportation officers that endeavoured to denaturalise him. Mahmoud was a negotiator in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, which transformed the (enclosed space of) Columbia University’s lawn into common land. Countering the enclosure, the phoniness of novelist Philip Roth’s ‘American pastoral’ is transformed into its opposite: ‘the indigenous American berserk.’ Suppressed by the settler-state, the indigenous counter-pastoral berserk manifests the anti-imperialist self-defence, from Turtle Island to Palestine.
During the 1948 Nakba, Mahmoud’s family was made refugees by Zionist paramilitaries and pushed into Syria. I imagine Mahmoud’s first child laughing with the revenge of martyrs following the Third Intifada. I dream of other children laughing at settlers as they leave Palestine, their dinner on the table still warm like twenty impossibilities, after the last sky.
Another descendant of the refugees who were ethnically cleansed and deprived of Palestinian citizenship, *Abby seeks naturalisation in Canada. Abby was my first queer love, which was denaturalised and made artificial or ‘against the order of nature’ in countries that criminalise homosexuality. Queering the map, my first love was denaturalised by ‘this alien legacy’ of sodomy laws: Section 377 of the British colonial penal code. Fought against by my eighty-sixed great-uncle and other Malayan communists, the British colonial penal code outlaws consensual same sex activity, and Abby and I, from Sri Lanka to Malaysia.
During the 1967 Naksa, Abby’s family was rendered stateless by the Zionist movement and driven out to Lebanon. I dream of Mahmoud’s family and other Palestinian refugees holding the keys to homes they were uprooted from decades ago, and feasting and dancing dabke in al-Quds and Rafah next year, Jaffa oranges returning to their natural habitat following the fall of the Iron Wall, an artificial blockade. I imagine Abby’s family returning to their original hometown, and nature healing in Ramallah and Masafer Yatta, the natural world leaping towards Bethlehem and Jabalia refugee camp after the opening of the Wall of
Apartheid.
Human Nature
Artificial, oppressive, Australia was established by treating, and making non-existent, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as Indigenous nature. Like Indigenous flora and fauna, Indigenous lives are being annihilated by Australia, an unnatural and iron-fiste settler-state that replaces Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with Protestant-Anglo colonisers, and Indigenous gum trees with invasive jacarandas. From so-called Australia to Israel, Indigenous peoples are made not refugees like political dissidents or ethnic minorities, neither Jewish Canadian union organisers nor Zainichi Koreans, but foreign aliens existing in their own land.
Citizenship rights are ‘alienable,’ enjoyed only by citizens and able to be removed rom dissidents or minorities, whereas universal human rights prove forceless and insufficient. Unlike my great uncle or denaturalised Armenians who were forced to flee from their own country, and sought refuge and rights in another place outside Malaya or Türkiye, respectively, Indigenous peoples are alienated in their own land, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, from Gadigal Country to the Gaza Strip.
What does liberation mean? Not naturalisation laws, citizenship or human rights, no. Not just. Emancipation comes after Indigenous sovereignty and abolition of unnatural states. Cruel, inhumane, fake, artificial colonial settler-states are neither ‘natural’ nor positive parts of human existence, and they are destined for decolonisation by the anti-imperialist self-defence that challenged the British colonial penal code and fought for the liberation of Palestine and Aboriginal land, between the Solidarity Encampment(s) and Gaza, from the indigenous berserk until victory.
For good reasons Indigenous peoples have resisted artificial settler-states, both during colonisation and now, and transnational movements have, naturally, been reasserting alternative conceptions of sovereignty and citizenship. Because until none of us is denaturalised or made ‘against the order of nature,’ all of us are unfree, unnatural, not human.
