Paper short abstract:

Ethnographically illustrated by one woman's voluntary return, this paper analyses the emotions involved in 'giving up' and 'going back'. It follows her to Kurdistan, engaging with the shame, grief, regret, and relief permeating four specific moments as she returns to what no longer feels like home.

Paper long abstract:

Dunkirk, France is home to a tent settlement of mostly Kurdish migrants attempting to reach the United Kingdom. In early 2019 Soma, a 60-year-old Iraqi Kurdish woman, had been trying to cross with her three sons for 8 months. Because her youngest son is disabled and requires a wheelchair, smugglers refused to work with Soma's family, deeming them unfit for the journey. After weeks of deliberating, Soma and her sons decided to separate - her two older sons crossed to the UK and Soma self-deported to Kurdistan with her youngest son.

This paper engages with the emotions involved in four moments in her return process: shame and heartbreak when they decide to separate, grief and joy when her sons reach the UK, relief upon arrival to the state-administered self-deportation centre, and her regrets relayed to me in hushed tones on the roof of her home in Slemani when I visited some months after her return. It also engages with the relationship of these emotions to materiality and space (Navaro-Yashin 2009), their political nature and capacity (Massumi 2015), and what they do as they reverberate through Soma, her family, the Dunkirk settlement, her friends and networks in Kurdistan, and myself as participant-observer (see Behar 1997). They contribute to and reflect interrelated affective economies (Ahmed 2004) in both Dunkirk and Kurdistan, generated by 'giving up' and 'going back' to a place that may not feel like home anymore, while also shaping what it means to leave for Europe in the first place.