Resisting Erasure existence. 17 This then delegitimises the existence on the borderline, forcing stateless actors to be defined by a longing for citizenship to justify their existence. In Alien Land, Swaitat ridicules the notion of a sense of belonging believed to be inherent in a legal national identity, by emptying the term ‘home’ of meaning.18 He does so in his play Alien Land, adapted from Emile Habiby’s iconic sciencefiction novel The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, where he tells the story of Saeed travelling with an alien, observing the lands and experiences he comes across as extra-terrestrial. 19 Here, Swaitat ridicules our certainty of what space means, through the figure of the principal character Saeed, for example when he asks the audience: ‘Do I look to you like someone from this planet?’. 20 Through this, the term ‘home’ loses all ontological and territorial certainty. Yet, this existence on the borderline is one approached in terms of empowerment, rather than as a marker of vulnerability. This is seen in the chapter ‘Saeed belongs’, where he details his family legacy of displacement and living on the borderline.21 By affirming that this experience still means he is accorded a feeling of belonging despite not having a territorially bounded ‘home’, Swaitat shows an empowered permanence on the borderline. By reaffirming the existence on the borderline through the empty metaphor of ‘home’, an empathetic emotional and cognitive understanding of the comprehensive experience of statelessness is achieved. To be stateless is no longer merely a matter of sympathy for someone seeking recognition. By drawing parallels between the aspirational striving for a belonging to a ‘home’ as to that of a ‘legal identity’, stateless art interlocutors show that existence on the margins of the nation-state is not all that exceptional — allowing the audience to enter the imaginative experiential world of stateless peoples. UNIVERSALITY OF EXPERIENCE Statelessness is often set in counter-opposition to citizenship, creating an impenetrable boundary between the two social categories. Stateless art interlocutors use their art to navigate this binary, testing its limits. By building connections and discussing the idea of membership beyond the nation, they underline the universality of experience. They highlight similarities that deconstruct an understanding of stateless and non-stateless as inherently different. Nonetheless, artists also shed light on the importance of showing the differences of experience, to show how empathy must not erase difference. Firstly, the Kurdish artist Shorsh Saleh spoke of feeling like a ‘global citizen’ and how he tries to reflect this in his art by championing an idea of membership beyond the nation-state. Indeed, Audra Simpson argues that currently our knowledge archive on ‘membership’ is structured through prior languages and experiences of exclusion. 22 In fact, Saleh insisted that he wanted to use a style of miniature painting based on traditional Middle Eastern carpet motifs, with bright 17 18 19 20 21 22 Tendayi Bloom, ‘Members of Colonised Groups, Statelessness and the Right to Have Rights’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 157. Alien Land (n 1). See Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, tr Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Interlink Books 2001). Alien Land (n 1) 2. Habiby (n 19) ch 2. Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States, (Duke University Press 2014) 9. 321