11 Displaced Voices: Literature of the Refugees and Undocumented Migrants

Mr. Subhadeep Kumar

About this chapter

This module charts the contemporary writings emerging from the experiences of exile and displacement suffered by refugees and undocumented migrants. We are witnessing huge global flows of forced migration right now, particularly stemming from West Asia and North Africa.

Introduction:

We are living in an age of Forced Migration. Presently there are 65.3 Million forcibly displaced people in the world, according to modest UN estimates. In the current decade itself, an estimated 11 million had been recently displaced in Syria alone, 6.6 million within the country and 4.8 million seeking refuge in other countries. These people are undertaking harrowing journeys across international borders and frontlines of myriad conflict to reach a putative place of safe haven, albeit an illusory place, where they can recuperate from the trauma, account for their losses and embark on re-creation of their lives. They might imagine a new diasporic myth of return or reconceive a new Home – things that refugees are expected to do. Meanwhile their arrivals had been greeted by renewed xenophobia in their targeted destinations. European states are busy juggling the migrants’ legitimate asylum rights, consequently the refugees’ journey seems unending. The exodus becomes an unending sojourn. The consequent loss of belongings, of loved ones and previous local moorings make the refugee camps the site of new contestations for resources and memories.

In June 2016, a group of migrant artists collaborated with native European writers and artists for an exhibition named – Call Me By My Name: Stories from Calais and Beyond. Calais, a town on the French channel coast remains the largest refugee staging ground in Western Europe. The drawings, the poems and the short sketches of dislocation that were collected for this endeavour reiterates Salman Rushdie’s observation in his 1991 piece ‘Imaginary Homelands’ – the migrant reflects the predicament of the 20th century human, bereft of belongings, the migrant could only cling on to her memory and try to refashion it. It is a resistant attempt to reclaim one’s own history in the face of constant attempts of effacement. Thus the new literature of refugees and undocumented migrants is a constitutive part of our globalized cultural present.

Refugees and Undocumented Migrants – A Conceptual Issue:

Every refugee is technically a migrant. However, the term refugee comes with certain legal guarantees; notably the 1951 Refugee Convention, which states – “owing to a well- founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.” The convention makes it binding for the Signatory countries to provide social security to refugees. Hence we have the constant bickering regarding the status of the newly arrived’s situation of deprivation. Signatory states continuously try to downplay the forced migrants’ plight, denoting them as usual migrants, supposedly embarking on a free and voluntary journey. The tendency is reciprocated by the countries of migrants’ origin which try to deny acts of targeted discrimination against the fleeing population. Hence, these people are often placed in a position of legal liminality and in the absence of a better term can be called ‘undocumented migrant’. The representation of loss found in the forced migrants’ writings is thus itself an act of claiming a respectable legal and political subjectivity. As Warsan Shire writes in her poem ‘Home’ – “You have to understand / that no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than land”. It should be noted literature of the refugees and that of the undocumented migrants are not typologically distinct groups of literary practice but an axis of the migrant writer subjects’ ascribed position. It is constantly deliberative and is mediated discursively.

Displacement, Refugees and Literature:

Displacement and forced migration had been recurrent themes of literature since antiquity. Virgil’s Aeneas flees an ancient war in West Asia and crosses the Mediterranean in search of safety. He eventually finds it in Italy – and founds the dynasty that would later spawn the Roman empire. Startling as it might be for some, the roots of European civilisation stem in part from the story of a refugee. In fact one of the foundational books of European civilization, The Bible is replete with themes of dislocation and banishment. The book of Exodus is an obvious example, so are the gospels. Luke’s first gospel portrays the infant Jesus as a kind of migrant, shunned by the innkeepers of Bethlehem. In depicting Jesus’s escape from King Herod, Matthew later highlights the family’s flight to Egypt. Some of the stalwarts of modern Western culture were refugees. Marx and Engels were refugees, so were Vladimir Nabokov, Bertholt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno.

Two World Wars, violent and myopic nationalisms and innumerable localized strifes had made refugees an enduring testament of the failures of the modern state system and of relation between them. Art and literature represent this failure and its human results. A look at the iconic 1980s cartoon series – Maus by Art Spiegelman, discloses the pains of dislocation the preceding European generations went through. Beneath its inimitable graphic styles, Maus is a poignant interview of Spiegelman’s father, a Polish Jew and a holocaust survivor.

The most pervasive theme in science fiction narrative had actually been the story of refugees. They flee from planetary destruction, war, or just from overcrowding and  ecological destruction. Superman gets sent to safety when his home planet Krypton is destroyed. It’s no coincidence that Superman is also the poster boy for assimilation — his “real” family is the Kents of Kansas, and he thinks of himself as an American. He gets to live the refugee’s dream, being totally accepted into a prosperous new world — plus he’s physically and mentally superior to everyone else around him. He’s the embodiment of the melting pot. His creators Siegel & Schuster were the sons of poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, mainly Lithuania and Ukraine.

Doctor Who has the same alien-world story as Superman, but without the assimilation. There are also tons of characters who flee a doomed or destroyed Earth, including Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series. John Varley’s novels frequently take place in a universe where humans have been forced to flee an Earth invaded by aliens, and have colonized the rest of the solar system as a result.

Every eco-disaster narrative or post-apocalyptic story includes some kind of refugee motif, with people fleeing the destroyed cities or trying to find a safe haven. Like The Day After Tomorrow, The Postman, Waterworld, or Mad Max. Or Steven Gould’s novel Blind Waves. The Martian attacks in War Of The Worlds spawn a huge fleet of refugee ships running away from the carnage. Islanders flee rising sea levels, only to drown or wind up in horrible refugee boat camps, in the 2002 young adult novel Exodus. Exodus is also a novel of the Jewish diaspora and the armed struggle for Israel, written by Leon Uris.

Said and Olaussen propose a new paradigm of representation that is needed by refugees. Whether mediatised or articulated through literature, the refugee is far from representing her/himself; rather, they are represented. The obvious pattern of refugees can be glimpsed from media representations that „turn the refugee problem into a spectacle where migrants attempt to reach Europe in overloaded boats, often failing in the process‟.

Refugee as a Theme Written by Non-refugees:

In the last 2 decades there has been a proliferation of representation of refugee experience by non-refugees. The significant point of departure of these writings from previous representations of displacement is that, whereas the earlier representations in English (as in other Western literatures) had been of the White European refugee – either a Jew or an anti-communist reaching the presumed bastions of freedom and fighting refugees  in western liberal democracy, in the New writings these figures are mostly non-Europeans – possibly Arabs or Africans escaping totalitarian regimes and dirty wars engineered by the west for natural resources like oil and for power over the Other, represented often by another religious group and the civilisation that religion spawns.

Dave Eggers’s What is the What is a racy narrative of escaping wars and attendant privations of fleeing. It is based on the life and true story of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, who walked thousands of miles to escape the violence always surging in his wake, who found struggle and squalor in refugee camps and who eventually came to the US as part of the Lost Boys of Sudan program—only, of course, to find that his problems weren’t over. His second novel continuing the same narrative is The City of Thorns – For all Europe’s panic about the recent wave of migrants, City of Thorns underlines how the vast majority of the world’s 60 million displaced never leave hellholes like Dadaab.

Chris Cleave’s Little Bee is a popular novel about the plight of a young Nigerian refugee and the English woman whose life she changes when she shows up after two years behind razor wire in a detention center after their first horrific meeting on an African beach.

Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon is no refugee, of course, but Joe Kavalier is, and his story was to me the most compelling and memorable part of this popular novel. Joe lands in New York City as a 19-year-old Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague, and he spends the entirety of the book trying to get his family—in particular his little brother—to safety in America.

The Uninvited by Jeremy Harding takes the Balkan wars as the backdrop for a masterful account of migration in and to Europe in the late 90s. Combining forensic reportage, elegiac writing and sharp meditations on the history of migration, Harding documents the then popular routes between Albania and Italy, and Morocco and Spain, before exploring the asylum systems people encountered on arrival.

However, if we need to understand the place of refugees and other Modern dislocated subjects in our world, then we need to conceptually differentiate between the representation of the forced migrant by non-migrants from the forced migrant’s mode of self representation.

Literatures of Migrants and Refugees:

Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi – personal, political graphic novel based on the stories Abdelrazaq’s father told her about growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and incorporating Palestinian iconography and art is a striking coming-of-age story that that began as a webcomic! The author’s eye for detail make her father’s young age a period piece of an era, just 30 years removed by calendar but striking in its representation of an youth so different from our expectations.

Porochista Khakpour’s The Last Illusion is an Iranian refugee’s story who is now an US citizen, Khakpour wrote in CNN recently that she compares her feelings about the recent orders regarding refugees of the Trump cabinet to the thoughts she had after 9/11: “What is going to happen to this country, what will they do to my other country? You can be a refugee once, I’ve always thought, but how to be one twice?” This wonderful novel The Last Illusion tells the story of another kind of refugee: an Iranian boy raised as a bird (read: in a birdcage, eating bugs) who is adopted by an American psychologist and brought to New York to try to become a man (and maybe learn how to fly, after all this time).

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner was an American bestsellerfrom South Asia. Khaled Hosseini came to the United States with his family in 1980, seeking asylum during the Soviet–Afghan War. The protagonist of his mega-bestselling first novel follows a similar path, growing up in Kabul before escaping to Pakistan and then California during the war before going back to rescue his best friend’s son from an orphanage.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees – Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and came to America as a refugee in 1975, landing first in a refugee camp in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania and eventually moving to San Jose. His 2015 novel The Sympathizer won a slew of awards, including the Pulitzer. His new book is a sharp collection of stories focused largely on the lives of Vietnamese exiles in California, and will absolutely live up to the hype.

Goodbye Sarajevo by Atka Reid and Hana Schofield – Seventy years after the second world war, it is tempting to see the refugee experience as something that happens to people who aren’t from Europe. Goodbye Sarajevo is an important counterpoint – the true story of a family trapped in the besieged city during the Balkan wars of the 90s. Written jointly by two sisters from a middle-class family, it is a moving reminder that war and displacement can disturb even the calmest of lives.

Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone (2007) Beah’s memoir offers a rare chance to see war from the eyes of a child soldier, brainwashed and kept obedient with drugs and guns. But the bleakness of this account is also tempered with the redemption that comes at the end. He gets out. And the very act of reading as he tells the story of his past is indication that a nightmare like this can end.

Poetry of Forced Migration:

The attendant dislocation of forced migration seldom leaves the refugee with the resources, leisure and mental calmness to embark upon their book. Thus often the first muse of the refugee’s art is poetry. It is a form suited to represent their fragmented, tentative and insecure predicament while waiting for that illusive notice of inclusion in the wastelands of Modern nation states. The Calais exhibition that we discussed brings forth countless poems, often scribbled defiantly against laws as graffiti on compound walls. We are seeing a proliferation of short poignant verses, and lyrics emerging from refugees. We can mention  the Malian refugee Aziza Brahimi or the Palestinian Arab writer Rafeef Ziadah working from London. Her poems like ‘Hadeel’, ‘Shades of Anger’, ‘We Teach Life Sir’ had done more for highlighting the plight of the dispossessed of Gaza more than any UN or Arab League resolution.

We can also mention the poem Home by Warsan Shire, which became an internet sensation recently. ‘Home’ is a fairly short poem, but in its few dozen lines it provides perhaps the best summary of what drives refugees to risk their lives at sea:

‘No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border / when you see the whole city / running as well.’ – This evocative stanza hit a nerve online recently as the European public finally woke up to the reality of the refugee crisis.

 Being a refugee has also touched many aspects of poet JJ Bola’s life. He fled Congo for London with his parents at the age of six. The refugee experience, its effacement of earlier identitarian moorings, its phobic race to assimilate with the Host culture is encapsulated in  his poem Refuge:

‘We came here to find refuge / They called us refugees / So we hid ourselves in their language / until we sounded just like them. / Changed the way we dressed / to look just like them / Made this our home / until we lived just like them.’

In her poem ‘Here and There’, Sozan Mohammed from Kurdistan describes the sense of   alienation   in   the   new   home   (England)   and   her   aspirations    for    the    journey back to her native country:

My steps are dragging me along the road

My remote imagination demanding an inspiration

…….

I used to find inspiration by the sun … the moon… the sea and the sky

Even the walls of my bedroom were inspiring’

At the end of the poem the poet confesses:

‘I am an unfinished portrait

left shuttered in the middle of nowhere Or perhaps I am a lost individual

Left divided between here and there’

This is one aspect of liminality described by Victor Turner,which is

“woven into the narratives of forced migration through the use of languages and images of confusion,   where   the   sense   of    exile    and    exhaustion    creates    an    uncanny    sense of in betweenness”.

 Sentiment of  longing is repeatedly articulated in narratives by refugees, as in the case in this poem – ‘In the Name of Kabul’ by Berang Kohdomani (an Afghani refugee):

My presence is here but

My heart is in the alley-ways of Kabul

My tongue utters its name

My lips sing a song of Kabul.

The dream of returning is often met with drastic problems. De-territorialisation can hardly be achieved because the emphasis is placed on the old territory (home).

 Hilton Mendelsohn inquires in ‘Another African Catastrophe’ why he cannot now hear those voices and see those men and women who have fought against Apartheid to free the country from the new colonial ‘native’?

Another African Catastrophe Born out of apathy

Black men and women

Will always talk And talk Bring up Apartheid

And slave boats,And exploitation

By white folks

But what about when it is our own?’

The poem addresses the reasons behind the phenomenon of mass refugeefication in the world today.

These are poems written mostly in that moment, albeit a long and unending moment of flight. We might not find the gathered reflective pathos of a second generation migrant like Li Young Lee or an earlier Carlos Zamara. That reflection might follow, once that harrowing moment of dispossession is passed and recollected in tranquillity.

Summary :

The above module offers a brief overview of the present wrings about and by refugees. We distinguished the differences between types of migrants and their representations, whether by themselves or by sympathetic others. In a world of increasing displacement, the forced migrants’ quest for social, moral and ontological stability might be a quest of humanity in general in the late modern world.