What haunts me through the thankful remark of the migrant woman I interview for my PhD project is the question of what compels her to thank. What makes a newcomer, a migrant, an arrival, an obligation to thank? What compels her to seek a mutual consensus on the gratefulness among the “we,” and consequently, what makes her believe that the gratitude of the “I” is also the gratitude of the “we,” the gratitude of the former colonial as the “we”? How such a feeling is disciplined and regulated? How can feeling of gratitude become a feeling of an indebtedness, an indebtedness of a debt that is both repayable and unrepayable at the same time? How can the gift of “having a new life,” a life that my interviewee is so grateful, become not only the gift of life but also the gift of death? How can this gift of life as/and gift of death become a value for exchange? If love works through the logic of exchange, of a reciprocal exchange, then could it be that the gift of love becomes the debt of love, a debt that is already a refutation of the love that it proclaims? Could it be that the gift of love is also the gift of time, of a transitional time, of a time given to a temporal being in transition, in awaiting and in hoping for transformation? As Derrida puts it in „Given Time,“ when a gift is received as a gift, it is no longer a gift, it is a debt. In this paper, I do not seek an empathetic redemption through gratitude, but rather, I trace the complicity between the receiver of the gift of gratitude/the migrant woman and the giver of that gift within the Swedish liberal empire—a complicity that is convoluted, irredeemable, and doubtlessly, unredemptive. I believe this complicity is intrinsic to the mechanism of biopowers in which the ethnic subjects are obliged to thank.

Lan Kieu is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at Umeå University. Her research interests include postcolonial feminism, feminist theory, and issues of race, ethnicity, and power in a globalized world.

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