This chapter explores the intersection between refugee movements and the broader phenomenon of human mobility today. My starting point is the experience of two young refugee women, Mariam and Semira.1 They were born and grew up in Eritrea – a country which they describe as beautiful, but where ‘security and hope are scarce for most people’. In Eritrea, military service is compulsory, and in practice, for many, extends for several years. Mariam and Semira, like tens of thousands of young Eritreans before them, fled the country after prolonged periods of service, their requests for demobilisation denied. They embarked on a dangerous journey through Sudan, where they first met, and across the border to Libya, travelling at high speed on pick-up trucks for a month through the harsh desert, watching others fall off and die of injuries or thirst, themselves surviving on biscuits and water.

This chapter, which is divided into two parts, includes the script of the performance lecture Men in Waiting, preceded by the research on art and migration that underpins it. The project is in part a phenomenology of incarceration that studies what happens to perception when it is limited to the prison architecture used for immigration detention in the United Kingdom. It is also an artistic enactment of that subjectivity, and this text is a reflection on the time and space produced in this performative reflection. Through puppetry the performance takes place in a shadow world, not unlike that of Plato’s protagonist in the Republic who seeks to bring the people to enlightenment and is made a martyr as a result. Plato’s allegory would indicate that we all have access to the human condition of confinement in the dark with only shadows. However, the specific shadowside of the world as seen through the United Kingdom’s immigration detention centres was what this Darwin Lecture immersed the audience in. Writing and performing this play was a way to sit with the shadow, and within the shadow.

Science is an international endeavour. Its development depends on exchanges of ideas and expertise, which are made possible by people moving from one part of the world to another. I myself am an immigrant at least twice over. I grew up in India and studied in the United States, spending almost three decades there before moving again to England almost 19 years ago to work at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge. I was not the first immigrant to arrive there. In fact, the first three directors of the LMB were all immigrants. The first director, Max Perutz (1914–2002), was Austrian. The second, Sydney Brenner (1927–2019), and the third, Aaron Klug (1926–2018), were both South Africans. The current director, Jan Löwe, is also an immigrant, from Germany.

I’d like to begin by asking you to think back to the 2012 Olympic Games. This was an event that I’ve come increasingly to see as the high-water mark of a phase in Britain’s attitudes towards migration, integration, race, and identity. It was a vast, very expensive, very lavish – wonderful in my view – pageant directed by Danny Boyle. It was a celebration of British culture and British creativity. Like all Olympic ceremonies, it was designed to try to say something about the nation to whom the Olympic torch had just been passed.

We all have a story, a narrative. Friends and family members may know it, and it may get passed down the generations. Sometimes stories are all we have of a past; they may be dramatic – witnessing historic moments or disaster; they can be life-changing and are often ordinary. They can knit a sense of self, identity, and even bind a nation.