Refugee Genres: Essays on the Culture of Flight and Refuge 3031092562, 9783031092565

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Refugee Genres Essays on the Culture of Flight and Refuge

Edited by Mike Classon Frangos · Sheila Ghose

Refugee Genres

Mike Classon Frangos  •  Sheila Ghose Editors

Refugee Genres Essays on the Culture of Flight and Refuge

Editors Mike Classon Frangos Faculty of Arts and Humanities Linnaeus University Växjö, Sweden

Sheila Ghose School of Culture and Education Södertörn University Huddinge, Sweden

ISBN 978-3-031-09256-5    ISBN 978-3-031-09257-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 Chapter 1 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see licence information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This volume is the result of a research symposium, “Refugee Literatures and Histories,” which took place on 17–19 December 2019 at Södertörn University and provided the initial inspiration for this collection. The symposium was organised by Mike Classon Frangos (Linnaeus University) and Sheila Ghose (Södertörn University), with funding provided by Riksbankens jubileumsfond. A number of the chapters in this collection were first presented at the symposium, and the authors and editors would like to thank the participants and respondents for their generous contributions and feedback, especially Roberto del Valle Alcalá, Ashleigh Harris, Stefan Helgesson, Nicklas Hållén, Alison Jeffers, Ebere Nweze, Sukhdev Sandhu, and Agnes Woolley. We would also like to thank the members of the Migration, Citizenship and Belonging cluster at Linnaeus University for helpful feedback on the introduction to the volume, especially Anna Baral, Barzoo Eliassi, Torun Elsrud, and Liv Nilsson Stutz. The editors of this volume have benefited from research time generously provided by the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, and the Teacher Education program at Södertörn University. Our individual chapters and the volume’s introduction are the results of this research time. We are also grateful to the English department at Södertörn University for providing funds for Open Access publication of the introduction. Finally, we wish to express solidarity with the refugee authors, artists and performers discussed in the volume, and all refugees, everywhere.

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Contents

1 Why  Refugee Genres? Refugee Representation and Cultural Form  1 Mike Classon Frangos and Sheila Ghose Part I Life Writing: Memoir, Comics, Poetry  23 2 “How  Do we Survive the Memory of So Much Waiting?”: Reconfiguring Empathy in Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee 25 Sheila Ghose 3 Family  Journeys: Refugee Histories in Vietnamese American Graphic Memoirs 45 Mike Classon Frangos 4 Insular  Metaphors: Representations of Cyprus in Mediterranean Refugee Literatures after the 1980s 67 Daniele Nunziata

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Part II Performance and Documentary Media  87 5 Home  Is Goose Bumps (on a Second Skin): Refugee Experience in the Songs of the Zollhausboys 89 Christine Farhan 6 Migrant  and Radical: Political Migrant Theatre and Activism in Migrations: Harbour Europe111 Szabolcs Musca 7 On  the Necropolitics of Contemporary Human Uprootedness: Ecocentric Empathy in Documentary Film and Philosophy133 Graça P. Corrêa Part III The Refugee Novel 155 8 Splitting  Apart, Coming Together: Bildung (…shards…) into Mosaic-Being through Performance of the Refugee and Forced-­Migration Bildungsroman157 Alexandra Christian Budny 9 Shattered  Forms: Transnational Migration Literatures in Melilla and the Balkan Refugee Route177 Gorica Majstorovic 10 “Slowly  Into Darkness”: Postmemory in Alison Pick’s Far to Go and Natasha Solomons’ Mr Rosenblum’s List195 Mona Becker 11 Responding  to Refugee Children: Transfigurations of Genre and Form in Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends and Lost Children Archive215 Chinmaya Lal Thakur

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Part IV Coda 233 12 The Refugee Imaginary235 Pramod Nayar Correction to: Why Refugee Genres? Refugee Representation and Cultural Form  C1 Mike Classon Frangos and Sheila Ghose Index245

Notes on Contributors

Mona Becker  is a researcher and teacher in English literary studies at the department for English and American Studies at the Martin-Luther-­ University in Halle, Germany, as well as a theatre practitioner. She was awarded her PhD in 2019 from the University of Essex. Her research currently focusses on postgeneration narratives of National Socialist and (Post)Colonial violence. Alexandra  Christian  Budny  received her PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation on the Refugee and Forced Migration Bildungsroman. She has published book chapters in edited collections in the field of Refugee Studies. Mike  Classon  Frangos received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, before being awarded a post-doctoral position in digital humanities at HUMlab, Umeå University. Since 2018, his research on comics and graphic novels has been funded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies and the Swedish Research Council. He has published articles on Swedish-and English-language comics artists in such journals as European Comic Art and The Comics Grid. Graça  P.  Corrêa  is a researcher at University of Lisbon, affiliated with CFCUL-Center for Philosophy of Sciences, where she directs projects on empathy, eco-philosophy and ethics. Select publications: Sensory Landscapes in Harold Pinter: A Study in Ecocriticism (LAP, 2012), Gothic Theory and Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Landscapes in Film, Theatre and Architecture (Caleidoscópio, 2020). Alongside her academic career, she works as direcxi

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tor, playwright and dramaturg in professional theatre companies. She currently teaches MA seminars at ESTC-School of Theatre and Cinema. Christine  Farhan is Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature at Södertörn University. In 1981, she moved from Germany to Sweden, where she received her PhD in 1992. She is currently a member of the project “The (dis-)connected refugee,” examining refugee life stories and how they create trust and familiarity. Sheila Ghose  received her PhD from New York University in 2006 and has published on British Asian writing and Postcolonial Sweden. She is currently working on fake memoirs and has received funding from the teacher education program Södertörn University for a research project regarding refugee literature and empathy in upper-secondary education in Sweden. Gorica Majstorovic  is a writer and translator born in former Yugoslavia, to a Croatian mother and a Serbian father. At the outbreak of the war, she fled the country in 1991, and has lived in the United States, where she completed her PhD at New York University, and is currently a Professor of Spanish and Coordinator of Latin American Studies at Stockton University. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Atlantic Studies, Iberoamericana and Transmodernity. She is currently completing a book manuscript under contrast on the interwar Latin American literature and the Global South. Szabolcs Musca  is Founding Director of New Tides Platform (UK), currently leading an international research project on theatre and migration in Europe. He is project lead of Migrant Dramaturgies Network, an international research network on migrant theatre and performance. He is guest-editor of Performing Ethos’ special journal issue “Theatre and Migration between Ethics and Aesthetics” (2019), and his co-edited collection Redefining Theatre Communities: International Perspectives on Community-Conscious Theatre-Making was recently published by Intellect (2019). Pramod Nayar  His most recent books include Essays in Celebrity Culture, The Human Rights Graphic Novel, Ecoprecarity, Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic, Human Rights and Literature, among others. His work has also appeared in Prose Studies, Celebrity Studies, Narrative, Changing English, Ariel, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Image and Text, and other journals.

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Daniele Nunziata  After completing a DPhil at University of Oxford on Cypriot literatures of the long twentieth century, Nunziata has continued specialising in writing from the Middle East with a focus on refugee and diasporic literatures. His research has been published by PMLA, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Columbia University Press’ Studies in World Literature book series. He has organised and chaired conferences for research groups in Oxford, including OCCT, and has written for TORCH, Routed Magazine, and Writers Make Worlds. Chinmaya Lal Thakur  His work concerns the re-presentations of subjectivity in the novels of David Malouf. Thakur holds an MPhil degree from the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Apart from a number of reviews and essays that he has published on modernist literatures, postcolonial writing, novel theory, and continental philosophy, he has edited Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reader for Worldview Publications, New Delhi.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

G.B. Tran, Vietnamerica © G.B. Tran © Villard Closed Lands, Vault Festival, London, March 2020. © LegalAliens Theatre Closed Lands, Vault Festival, London, March 2020. © LegalAliens Theatre

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CHAPTER 1

Why Refugee Genres? Refugee Representation and Cultural Form Mike Classon Frangos and Sheila Ghose

During the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020–2021, the publication of anthologies in genres as varied as poetry, life writing and comics, among others, appeared to respond to the public health emergency and repeated lockdowns. Examples of poetry anthologies include not only self-published chapbooks but literary initiatives with major institutional backers. One project resulting in the anthology Poetry and Covid-19: An Anthology of Contemporary, International and Collaborative Poetry (2021), funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, celebrates “the value of poetry during difficult times” (2021, n.p.). During the same period, graphic narrative collections appeared with titles such as The Lockdown The original version of this chapter was previously published non-open access. A correction to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3031-09257-2_13 M. Classon Frangos (*) Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] S. Ghose School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2023, corrected publication 2023 M. Classon Frangos, S. Ghose (eds.), Refugee Genres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2_1

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Lowdown (2021) and Covid Chronicles: A Comics Anthology (2021). As it turned out, drawing and illustration were also well-suited to documenting experiences of lockdown and quarantine. Yet another genre, the Covid diary emerged as a crucial tool not only for individuals in lockdown, but also for Covid patients and researchers.1 Each example illustrates claims made on behalf of a particular genre, form or medium for representing and making meaningful the exceptional experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the above examples are not mutually exclusive—claims made on behalf of poetry or comics do not reduce the importance of diaries or life writing—the resources of each genre are nevertheless uniquely called upon to serve as modes of expression during exceptional times. Artistic or literary interventions sponsored by humanitarian organizations and publishers are not new. Responding to the perceived refugee “crisis” of 2015, the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group sponsored and published a literary collection titled Refugee Tales, released in three volumes between 2016 and 2019. With contributions by literary luminaries like Ali Smith and Abdulrazak Gurnah, the anthologies collect the “tales” of individual refugees in a form inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Each tale is composed by an author whose name is foregrounded in the collection based on the testimony of an anonymous refugee subject, combining personal testimony with fictional narrative. Though the allusion to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales provides a framing device situating the project in a literary genealogy, the styles of the texts themselves are remarkably varied. The first lines of the first volume’s prologue by David Herd, written in verse, state, “This prologue is not a poem / It is an act of welcome” (2016, v). What is the effect of calling attention to genre, even as a disavowal, in opening a collection of writing by and about refugees? Genre conventions appear necessary to establish the bounds of writing, yet are insufficient as humanitarian gestures. An example of what Lauren Berlant would call “genre flailing” (2018, 157), the authors of Refugee Tales reach for genres by which to express refugee voices in a recognizable form, drawing on the resources of poetry, fiction, testimony, travelogue, and so forth. In another such anthology, The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, edited by Viet Than Nguyen, the genre of life writing is foregrounded in the attempt to represent “refugee lives” in the essays collected in the anthology. As Nguyen puts it in the introduction, “All of these writers are inevitably drawn to the memories of their own past and 1  See, for example, the New York Times’s early call for Covid diaries at the beginning of the pandemic, “Why You Should Start a Coronavirus Diary” (2020).

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of their families” (2018, 22). While the forms of the essays in the collection vary—one chapter consists of a two-page drawing by graphic novelist Thi Bui—the genre of life writing adds to the coherence and intelligibility of each essay’s representation of refugeedom. Nguyen’s collection of refugee life writing powerfully attests to the specific histories and memories of displacement experienced by each author. But what is the role of writing itself, its forms and conventions, in shaping the conditions for expressing such experiences? How are life writing genres put into practice and transformed in the writing of refugee memories? How can genre itself be used by writers and artists to intervene in and respond to conventional discourses of refugeedom? The proposition of the chapters collected in Refugee Genres is that studying representations of refugee experience requires an interdisciplinary approach combining migration research with the theories and methods of the arts and humanities. By examining the role of genre and form in expressions of refugeedom, we call attention to the conventions by which refugee experiences are represented, as well as the emergence of new and experimental forms. How do particular genres and forms, with their distinct conventions and histories, shape representations of refugee experience? How do representations of refugeedom transform or push back against genres such as life writing and graphic memoir, poetry, theatre and song lyrics, documentary film, the Bildungsroman and the literary novel? Arts and humanities approaches to refugee studies have by this point been developed by a number of important critical studies. Summarizing the relevance of the arts and humanities for refugee studies, the editors of the groundbreaking collection Refugee Imaginaries write, “Refugee Studies needs to take the patient work of narrative and interpretation, perceiving and feeling, creating and de-creating, seriously” (2020, 2). As asylum seeking necessarily requires the work of representation in the filling out of forms and responding to interviews, often invoking empathy and critical thinking, the methods and approaches of humanistic inquiry are indispensable to Critical Refugee Studies. Understanding how representation itself works in the bureaucratic procedures and legal decisions that define and delimit the category “refugee” must be a part of any study of refugeedom. As numerous arts and humanities researchers in refugee studies have argued, the discursive performance of refugeedom is crucial to the recognition of asylum claims, while, at the same time, activist and refugee expressions have the potential to create conditions for claims to asylum to be acknowledged. In this sense, refugee

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expression and performance reflect and intervene in the discourses and procedures responsible for defining refugeedom itself. Turning to the arts and humanities in the study of refugeedom, we are able to reframe commonplace discussions of refugees as deserving of empathy, humanitarian aid and human rights. Rather than debating the limitations of appeals to empathy, or the failure of human rights for refugees and asylum seekers, the attention to representation in refugee expression allows for a focus on the forms by which human rights claims are articulated, and how such claims come to be imagined in the first place. As Alexandra S. Moore and Samantha Pinto put it in the introduction to Writing Beyond the State: Post-Sovereign Approaches to Human Rights in Literary Studies, “from starting at the recognition of the impossible binds of our reading practices, so hemmed in by statist discourse and limits, we might acknowledge but also find new ground beyond the either/or of celebrating or abandoning the human rights project” (2020, 24). Recognizing the practices of writing and expression that shape representations of human rights means not only taking into account the logic of state sovereignty against which refugee identity is defined, but also imagining alternatives to existing human rights regimes. Our collection contributes to the turn to arts and humanities approaches to refugee studies by paying particular attention to genre and form as practices of representation that shape refugee expression according or in opposition to particular conventions. Considering representations of refugees raises the question of how refugee identity has been defined historically, through for instance UN declarations and the logic of state sovereignty. Importantly, Peter Nyers argues that refugee identity has been imprinted by a logic of emergency. Refugees have been positioned as aberrations, disrupters of an “ordered state of affairs” (2006, 7), the result of a crisis-driven logic stemming from international humanitarian discourses of emergency intervention. In Nyers’s account, UN agencies and NGOs contribute to this notion by viewing refugee movements in terms of urgency by casting refugees as humanitarian subjects. For Nyers, refugees are brought into being as constitutive others, which allows for the presumed unity of the sovereign, ordered nation-state and citizen subject. The refugee is thereby a kind of “limit-concept,” Nyers claims, revealing the limits of the political, indicating their exclusion. He explains that. the refugee is constituted through a series of ontological omissions: whatever is present to the political subject (i.e., citizen) is absent to the refugee.

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The qualities of visibility, agency, and rational speech of the citizen-subject are conspicuously absent in conventional representations of refugees that cast them as invisible, speechless, and, above all, nonpolitical. (2006, 3)

The present collection, of course, does not turn its gaze towards “conventional representations,” but looks to ways in which aesthetic texts use genre conventions to, in fact, push the limits of representation, ways in which what Nyers terms “the political” can be recast to include refugee visibility and speech. In doing so, Refugee Genres draws from and contributes to the field of Critical Refugee Studies that opposes discourses that see refugees as traumatized and passive victims in need of humanitarian rescue, rather than as political subjects in their own right. As humanitarian subjects, refugees are institutionally silenced, depoliticized and dehistoricized as a result of the bureaucratic violence of refugee camps and migrant detention centres. As Marguerite Nguyen and Catherine Fung put it in their introduction to “Refugee Cultures: Forty Years after the Vietnam War,” “This frame of reference casts refugees as abject victims and downplays the particularities of refugee situations, including nation-states’ accountability and specific refugee histories and politics” (2016, 2). In other words, refugee victim narratives elide questions of responsibility for the production of refugees, as well as the particularities of refugee experiences. Crystalized through the post-World War II international regime for dealing with refugees and displaced persons, dominant discourses of refugeedom are those shared by humanitarian organizations, UN agencies, national and international actors in viewing refugees as subjects of humanitarian rescue, and thus also speechless.2 Refugees become both depoliticized and dehistoricized, as the specific histories and politics that have led to refugee displacements are discounted and ignored. As Liisa Malkki has influentially argued, “in universalizing particular displaced people into ‘refugees’—in abstracting their predicaments from specific political, historical, cultural contexts—humanitarian practices tend to silence refugees” (1996, 378). Universalizing refugees as dehistoricized, humanitarian subjects removes them from the

2  In addition to Malkki’s influential work (see also Malkki 1995), Lucy Mayblin (2017), Lyndsey Stonebridge (2018) and Yến Lê Espiritu (2014) have charted the development of post-World War II discourses of refugeedom in the context of decolonization and the Cold War.

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specific political and historical circumstances that are responsible for their displacement. We could ask, then, whether and how aesthetic texts could complicate a dehistoricized, crisis-driven, definition of refugeedom. Is it possible to engage in a different logic when discussing refugeedom? We ask how it would be possible to reconceive, even deconstruct, the discourse of the humanitarian subject, with its exclusionary logic? What alternative critical practices and aesthetic strategies could undo the binary of citizen and refugee? We are, thus, interested in understanding the ways that genre conventions themselves, whether upended or adhered to, open up for seeing the complex discourses that contribute to definitions and practices around stateless people—legal, humanitarian, artistic—and the historical emergence of them. We assert that refugee experience tends to resist encapsulation within hegemonic narratives, requiring modes of expression that cross the boundaries of genre and form. The purpose of this collection is to show how the attention to representation cultivated by the arts and humanities contributes to understanding refugeedom and its histories. We approach representation in refugee expression in part by examining particular genres—from life writing and graphic memoir, to poetry, theatre, song lyrics, documentary film, and the novel—as well as by examining formal strategies of fragmentation and experimentation. In our analyses, genres and forms appear as tools, not only for documenting refugee experiences, but also for activist intervention. By shifting the study of refugee representation to genre and form, we explore connections between contexts, including refugee solidarities across the Global South. Not comparing the oeuvres of particular authors and creators, we focus on the aesthetic forms of transnational and transcontinental refugee literatures. We examine performance practices made by and for refugees, and artistic projects presenting refugee experience with an activist agenda. Genres of life writing such as the memoir raise the issue of refugee self-­representation against the backdrop of official discourses that treat refugees as helpless victims in need of saving. Refugee authors’ hybrid forms of life writing point to the varying strategies to resist or refuse the obligation of gratitude assumed within conventional representations of refugeedom.

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Defining Refugee Genres Representations of refugees are not necessarily distinct from any other genres of expression, but rather participate in a broader cultural field in which the recognition and understanding of genre is central to interpretation. As Anna Bernard has written, “our thinking about the value and impact of refugee writing is inseparable from the question of literary craft, and therefore from the question of literary genre” (2020, 66). In other words, for refugee writing to have an impact in a cultural field it must also be recognizable as writing as such, and thus also as belonging to particular genres. In our collection, we use the term “genre” to refer to the way cultural forms are shaped by conventions and rules of discourse that are historically and culturally specific. Since genres can persist and vary across historical periods, as Raymond Williams has described, “genre” can be seen as a concept, not for describing a set of rules, but to investigate how particular objects are embedded within social and cultural relations.3 Genres appear in different cultural contexts and can vary across historical periods, as well as in different media formats: poetry, the novel, life writing, non-fiction, and many others, which can be found in the media of text, photography, film, digital media and so forth. Literary scholar Franco Moretti has described the “life cycle” (2005, 18) of genres, in which forms invented in one context are reinvented and adapted to new circumstances at later moments. For example, the life cycle of the Bildungsroman begins with the context of national formation in nineteenth-century Europe, but is adapted to the postcolonial context to illustrate the narrative of individual development in entirely different circumstances. Importantly, the contemporary genre-system is Western in origin and has historically been presumed to have a civilizing function following a progressive development from epic to novel.4 The concept of “genre” is thus not meant to provide an exhaustive account of cultural forms, but to understand how representational practices become legible within and against a global cultural field shaped by the genre-system.

3  Raymond Williams’s most frequently cited discussion of genre appears in Marxism and Literature (1977, 185). For an elaboration of Williams’s concept of genre in terms of the aesthetics of neoliberalism, see Elliot and Harkins (2013, 11). 4  See for example, Stephen Owen on genre classifications in East Asian and South Asian literature in contrast to the nineteenth-century European “evolutionary account of genres” (2007, 1390).

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Rather than attempting to classify or categorize particular kinds of representations, we turn to “genre” to call attention to how representations are shaped by dominant discourses, even as existing genres are in turn refashioned by emergent cultural practices. We see the term “genre” as a way of “gathering together nonhegemonic and transnational accounts of specific aesthetic texts” (2013, 3), as Jane Elliot and Gillian Harkins put it in the introduction to the special issue of Social Text on “Genres of Neoliberalism.” Similarly, Refugee Genres uses the category of genre to call attention to the histories and aesthetics of refugee expression beyond the representation of refugees as silent or passive victims. Precisely because genres and genre conventions can be read across contexts and periods, they can also make legible histories and expressions outside the dominant conventions of representation. By emphasizing aesthetic and cultural forms, the category of “genre,” we argue, makes visible histories and experiences otherwise excluded from hegemonic accounts. Turning to genre allows us to see refugees as cultural producers in their own right, participating in and contributing to what Long Bui has called in the Vietnamese American context the “refugee repertoire” (2016, 112) As Bui describes, the “performative repertoire” of Vietnamese American refugees is made up of “the different marginalized art forms that have not constituted the literary canon” (2016, 122), from hip hop and slam poetry to comics and street art. We use genre as a means to investigate refugee aesthetics outside of the literary canon, such as comics, song and other forms of performance, as well as within the canon, by looking at how established genres like the novel or memoir are used in the service of refugee storytelling and memory. Our collection on refugee genres contributes to the understanding of the significance of cultural forms for claims of human rights, particularly in the case of refugeedom. If the genres of refugee representation and expression are also the genres of culture at large, then attention to genre is necessary for understanding the significance of cultural forms for refugee subjects. Looking at genre and form does not only require attention to “discursive” or textual modes of expression, but also to the “performative” (or “performatic”), the way in which genre and form must be called into being and reinvented through each new articulation. As Goldberg, Moore and Mullins put it in their introduction to the special issue of College Literature on “Human Rights and Cultural Form,” “the archive is performative, experiential, material,” thus requiring “closer analysis of performatic texts as well as the literary archive, and indeed of the

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performatic dimension of the archive” (2013, 10). In other words, seeing cultural forms as performative entails attention both to performative genres such as drama, as well as how genre categories themselves are recreated and reinvented through new instantiations. As the authors of the chapters in this collection show, refugee memoirs, novels, theatre, song, comics, documentaries and other forms reinvent and transform their genres by refashioning them to fit the requirements of different contexts.

Genre Histories of Human Rights Previous research on the culture of human rights and rightlessness provides a starting point for our investigation into the genres and forms of refugee expression. As numerous scholars have argued, cultural forms, rather than being separate or ancillary to rights claims and the law, are in fact central to their formulation and circulation. Barbara Johnson has argued, for example, that lyric poetry with its techniques of prosopopoeia has played a crucial role in illustrating how “the human has been or can be defined” (1998, 551) in the context of legal discourse. According to Johnson, poetic devices such as personification are a sine qua non for codifying rights-bearing subjects into law by imagining rightless individuals as speaking subjects. In this sense, as Rachel Potter and Lyndsey Stonebridge put it, “writing anchors human rights law by providing images of the persons whose rights must be defended” (2014, 2). As we will see, the aesthetic “anchoring” of human rights in culture and representation has taken the form of a range of different genres and forms. Historians of human rights have noted that the eighteenth-century formulation of the “rights of man” or “natural rights” coincided with the rise of the literary novel. As historian Lynn Hunt writes, “Novels made the point that all people are fundamentally similar because of their inner feelings, and many novels showcased in particular the desire for autonomy” (2007, 39). For the novel to have the effect of revealing the inner life and emotional states of all individuals, specific literary techniques for representing consciousness had to be developed. For Hunt, it was the development of a particular genre of writing, the epistolary novel, that facilitated the formulations of natural rights by Enlightenment thinkers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s own best-selling epistolary novel, Julie; or, The New Heloise, was clearly inspired by the success of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. As Hunt notes, the significance of such texts for rights discourses is not only the epistolary form’s ability to open up the inner

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lives and desires of its characters. Rather, the most popular epistolary novels of the eighteenth century focused on the struggles of young heroines in vulnerable positions, in which the dramatic rightlessness of the characters contributed to the popular interest generated by these texts. Literary scholar Joseph Slaughter has similarly explored the role of the Bildungsroman in discourses of rights from the eighteenth century to the postcolonial period. As Slaughter documents, the classical Bildungsroman exemplified by J. W. von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship illustrates the emergence of the European bourgeoisie as the rights-­bearing subject par excellence. Under the influence of the Bildungsroman through the nineteenth century, claiming rights as a citizen of the nation would be equated with the capacity for Bildung, which is to say, the potential to develop into a fully realized bourgeois individual. The influence of the tradition of Bildung was so pervasive by the mid-twentieth century, according to Slaughter, that concepts of “development” and “progress” would be central to the formulation of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). In other words, universal human rights were understood by the authors of the UDHR as guaranteeing individuals and nations the capacity to develop as individuals and nations, in short, the Enlightenment concept of Bildung revamped for the twentieth century. It is this theme of development that would set the foundation for well-known postcolonial Bildungsroman by Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Michael Ondaatje, and others. Through the form of the Bildungsroman, postcolonial authors could make claims on behalf of new rights-bearing subjects in terms of the capacity of their protagonists for development—while also testing the limits of rights claims addressed in such terms. Slaughter’s argument about the trajectory of the Bildungsroman from the eighteenth century to the postcolonial period is highly persuasive as an account of how a particular genre of writing has been put to the service of claiming rights. If the postcolonial Bildungsroman has been an especially successful genre, this is no doubt a result of the close association between the image of the nation and the life of the protagonist, as the development of the individual and the development of the nation are typically equated in such texts. Notably, Slaughter is highly critical of this close connection, and speculates about other genres opening up for other visions of rights. As Slaughter argues:

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the complicity of human rights and the novel means that the field of literature is itself implicated in the discursive regime of human rights, so that it too must be recognized as an arena for the political, cultural, social, and economic manipulation of—and struggles for—human rights. (2007, 43)

Shining light on this hegemonic complicity is important, he asserts, because it opens up for a methodology for “thinking the formal, historical, sociological, and ideological human rights implications of other, nonhegemonic literary genres” (2007, 41). Slaughter gestures toward genres such as testimonio, epistolary fiction, and the picaresque novel as offering possible alternative forms for reconceiving rights. As legal scholar Anthea Vogl has documented, pernicious effects can follow from the close connection between the conventions of the Bildungsroman and human. In her research, Vogl followed the refugee settlement determination proceedings enacted by Australian officials with regard to the case of a female Burmese asylum applicant. The immigration officers’ expectations of asylum seekers’ narratives, she found, were shaped by their conceptions of the Bildung form, demanding that the applicant present a coherent story of flight to safety, as a self-aware and autonomous subject. In particular, she was asked to position herself as an omniscient narrator, having to explain the motives of people involved in the circumstances around her flight—fellow refugees, or incidental people in her home country. Significantly, here, the Bildungsroman as the narrative model for the universal rights of all persons contributed to diminishing the asylum applicant’s ability to present “credible” (2013, 83) narratives that might include trauma and multiple seemingly unlikely moments. Its genre conventions were used to force the applicant, not necessarily familiar with these conventions, to frame her story according to them, in what for her was a life-and-death situation. Vogl’s study, in sum, provides a stark example of the reliance on genre conventions for the enforcement and intelligibility of the existing human rights regime. It remains, thus, to be considered how genres and forms are used in the writing of rights for refugees and asylum seekers. While the Bildungsroman and narratives of development, often autobiographical, may be abundant in refugee writing, many such texts also mix genres and defy classification. In a trenchant analysis of Mohsin Hamid’s instantly canonical refugee novel Exit West (2017), Yogita Goyal posits that the refugee novel can be considered a genre of its own that does important work: “the refugee novel as a genre reckons with the difficulties of representation in relation

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to debates in visual culture, as well as in response to a number of recent calls to stage the contemporary refugee in connection with past histories of racial dispossession” (2020, 241). Goyal mentions the novel’s association with empathy and interiority, and its concern with the individual in relation to the community, to invoke the novel form’s relevance for refugee writing. By calling attention to the form of the novel as such, it is possible to assess how a novel like Exit West works to humanize refugees as “universal” subjects. Acknowledging at the end of her article that “we still need models for understanding how literary and cultural forms can navigate the demands of universalism and difference” (2020, 256), we might, with Goyal, consider how other genres and forms contribute to the work of refugee representation. For example, refugee comics and graphic novels have received increasing attention as a form that puts into practice a variety of verbal and visual strategies to represent refugee experiences. Comics scholars have called attention to the way comics have been used in refugee camps, not only as educational and humanitarian tools for aid workers, but also as a medium of expression by and for refugees themselves. Candida Rifkind (2020, 299) has argued that refugee comics specifically can counteract dominant representations of refugeedom, and thereby challenge distinctions between citizens and refugees, between the self and others. As Pramod Nayar writes, “The graphic novel is a pre-eminent form to thematize HR concerns, with its ability to merge text and image, force a critical literacy upon the reader, enable a visibilization of the act—and politics—of witnessing, capture trauma, embody violence, generate empathetic and affective connections, to cite a few key features of the medium” (2021, 4). Comics and graphic novels that seek to unsettle conventional representations of refugeedom may take the form of graphic journalism, such as Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993) or Kate Evans’s Threads (2017), or they may be graphic memoirs such as G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica: A Family Journey (2010) or Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (2017). Whether through family history or journalistic research, refugee graphic novels can highlight the lost histories and complicated genealogies of refugee experience through the resources of the comics medium. In general, life writing genres are indispensable in the culture of human rights. Witness testimony is a genre that shapes asylum seekers both as subjects of suspicion and as humanitarian subjects. In other words, the genre conventions of individual testimony in asylum processes allow us to understand the casting of refugees as objects of compassion in a

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humanitarian regime, underscoring the power relationship that characterizes the refugee’s subject position. The “genuine” refugee is expected to accept the position of being a humanitarian subject, dependent on compassion and charity, and remaining grateful—as opposed to the “bad” refugee, an active subject that claims inclusion in the political and the discourses of rights and dignity. The authentic, and therefore worthy, refugee is formed by narratives of compassion, pity and empathy. As Lauren Berlant states, compassion emerges “at historical moments, are shaped by aesthetic conventions, and take place in scenes that are anxious, volatile, surprising, and contradictory” (2004, 7). Berlant’s analysis here points to the complicity between power and aesthetic conventions constituting an inherently unstable alliance, which then perhaps might allow for us to glimpse a different notion of refugeedom. After all, if compassion itself is so complicated and situation-bound, so fraught with anxiety and non-­ coherence, what does that say about the refugee as humanitarian subject? In this context, the aesthetic conventions of life writing are necessary to articulate asylum claims and establish refugees as humanitarian subjects. While refugee testimonies are typically silenced in the asylum process, the first-person accounts of refugees and asylum seekers gain credibility and authority when published as memoirs. In turn, published memoirs by or about asylum seekers are shaped by the conventions of witness testimony. As a genre, the contemporary memoir frequently draws on trauma narratives and life-stories of vulnerability and suffering, including the narratives of refugees.5 As Gillian Whitlock has pointed out, refugee life writing includes not only those memoirs published by refugee authors, but also narratives recounted in the third-person by others that “bear witness to refugees and asylum seekers” (2015, 181). Life writing is an expansive term including not only first-person autobiographies, but also third-­ person biographies and fictional or semi-fictional texts drawing on the conventions of biography and autobiography. Indeed, life writing’s many forms resist classification in terms of classical autobiography, a literary form that emerged in the eighteenth century for producing and codifying an essential self through the telling of an individual life story.6 In particular, our 5  In addition to Whitlock (2015), see for example, Graham Huggan (2001) and Sarah Brouillette (2007) on postcolonial narratives in the literary marketplace. On the trauma memoir in particular see Roger Luckhurst (2008). 6  On autobiography and life writing, see for example, Linda Anderson (2001), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2010). Whitlock emphasizes the significance of these distinctions for postcolonial life writing (2015, 3).

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view is that refugee life writing calls into question the autobiography’s conventional narrative of the formation of the individual, demonstrating instead the impossibility of such a narrative in the face of ongoing histories of violence, displacement and trauma. In the expanded field of life writing, refugee memoirs often seek to call attention to and mobilize an activist response on behalf of particularly vulnerable groups through appeals to empathetic identification. The first-­ person account of a former child soldier, such as for example Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007), makes not only an affective appeal in construing refugees as deserving of compassion, but one that is also highly unsettling in its documentation of violence and atrocity. Such memoirs may be useful literary forms for mobilizing affect in a global context of refugee activism, while also calling attention to the distance between North-based readers and the spectacle of suffering in the Global South. Refugee memoir may also write back to dominant discourses of refugeedom much more explicitly, as in Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee (2019). Nayeri’s title cleverly resists the expectation of gratitude for refuge in the host country, a debt that can never be repaid, placing refugees in a minoritized and subordinate position. The function of life writing in Nayeri’s text is to refuse not only the expectation of gratitude, but also to undermine the very distinction between the “refugee” and the “immigrant,” and thus the global border regime that classifies migrants to begin with.

Migrant Performance and Media Like refugee memoir and life writing, migrant theatre takes place in a context in which asylum seekers and refugees are expected to perform a role according to the bureaucratic procedures and legal processes through which refugee status is determined. As numerous scholars have pointed out, the claim to asylum is performative in that it brings a subject into being, specifically the asylum seeker, through its very invocation.7 By claiming asylum from appropriate officials in the appropriate location at the appropriate time, the asylum seeker initiates what Alison Jeffers terms a “bureaucratic performance” (2011, 35) in which claims of refugeedom 7  This argument is persuasively elaborated in terms of speech-act theory by Jeffers (2011, 31–34), and by Whitlock (2015, 181–182), in her close reading of the asylum interview in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying.

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are evaluated and adjudicated. To be recognized as a refugee, the asylum seeker’s claims must be deemed authentic and credible, meeting the strictly determined requirements of the juridical definition of the refugee according to the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951 and related frameworks. As such, asylum seekers are recognized as refugees through an institutional performance that is both juridical and cultural inasmuch as it not only draws on cultural competences but also produces its subject according to codified discourses of asylum and refugeedom. Thus, the refugee’s bureaucratic performance is one with cultural effects and implications, not least on refugee and migrant expression and performance. Like memoir and performance, the genre of documentary can call attention to the performativity of truth claims for asylum seekers and the evaluation of their authenticity. As media scholars tend to emphasize, documentary is never strictly indexical to the reality it seeks to record, but rather performatively mediates information and events for its viewers. Agnes Woolley has pointed out the blurring of fact and fiction in refugee documentaries, arguing that “documentary is well placed to deal with the complexities of the narrative environment of refugee movement and life on and at the border” precisely because it operates “at the intersection of fact and narrative fiction” (2020, 149). Crossing the boundary of fact and fiction, documentary can register and reflect the situation for refugees whose claims of asylum are evaluated in a context of bureaucratic performance. In other words, the mediation of the documentary form itself expresses the performativity of asylum seeking in its narration of refugee experiences.8 Refugee documentaries, like Gianfranco Rosi’s highly lauded Fire at Sea (2016), can aestheticize refugee settings such as the camp at Lampedusa in order to call attention to the conventions of refugee representation. Other documentaries, like Daphne Matziaraki’s short film 4.1 Miles (2016) following a Hellenic Coast Guard captain off the island of Lesbos as he dramatically rescues migrants from drowning in the Aegean Sea, draw on conventions of narrative storytelling to represent refugee experiences. The chapters in this collection are not meant to provide an exhaustive or comprehensive survey of the genres and forms of refugee expression. 8  As Woolley continues, “As a form that is interested in revealing truth and the ways in which that truth is mediated, documentary storytelling coincides with the modes by which asylum seekers must present themselves as genuine or authentic refugees” (2020, 155).

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Instead, we aim to open up the question of refugee genres by exploring specific genres such as life writing and graphic memoir, theatre, song lyrics, documentary film, the Bildungsroman and the literary novel, while also highlighting the issue of cultural form in refugee expression at large. In so doing, the chapters in this collection contribute to understanding how refugee expression can put to use and transform existing and emergent genres to challenge dominant representations of refugeedom and advance alternatives.

Overview of Chapters The chapters in the first section, “Life Writing: Memoir, Comics, Poetry,” open the collection by examining multiple forms of refugee life writing. Sheila Ghose’s chapter, “‘How do we survive the memory of so much waiting?’: Reconfiguring empathy in Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee,” explores Dina Nayeri’s aesthetic strategies, in her testimonial work The Ungrateful Refugee (2019). Nayeri grapples with the problem of “exemplarity,” of being a stand-in for a larger collective of refugees that is often afforded pity and compassion. Lauren Berlant, among others, have foregrounded this problem of exemplarity: what kinds of demands for a capacious kind of empathy can one case evoke, and can the compassion engendered by one case spur collective action? Nayeri’s work revisits her memories of residing in a refugee camp, and visiting contemporary camps. The camp is a leading trope in her text, a space of despair and interminable waiting, but also of intimacy, gossip; the refugees are agents, political subjects in their own right, but also caught in a humanitarian paradigm demanding gratefulness. Significantly, she does not quite admit the readers who haven’t experienced it into the camp-space. This refusal is the driving force of her testimonial, and opens up a void underscoring the uncertainty of testimonial narration as well as the precariousness of empathy. Mike Classon Frangos’s chapter, “Family Journeys: Refugee Histories in Vietnamese American Graphic Memoirs” (Chap. 3), examines how the graphic memoir has been used for refugee memory and history with a focus on two works by Vietnamese American comics artists: G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2010) and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (2017). The form of the graphic memoir is put to use in the representation of individual and collective memories of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese American refugee migration to the United States. Materializing

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the persona of the artist-storyteller on the page through sequential narration and the juxtaposition of words and images, these texts employ the resources of the graphic memoir as a genre of life writing to document refugee histories in opposition to dominant representations. Daniele Nunziata’s chapter, “Insular Metaphors: Representations of Cyprus in Mediterranean Refugee Literatures after the 1980s” (Chap. 4), compares works by Sudanese author Tayeb Salih and Palestinian architect and memoirist Suad Amiry, exploring how Cyprus appears in them as a transcontinental metaphor for liminal identities. Nunziata shows how the writers’ use of the short story, poetry and life writing enables them to represent displacement, diaspora and Mediterraneanness. Cyprus here provides a point of reference for an “Arab-ness” that is not tied to nationalism, but encompasses postcolonial and transnational solidarity. The next section of the book, “Performance and Documentary Media,” focuses on migrant theatre, songs, and documentary media. Christine Farhan’s chapter, “Home is goose bumps (on a second skin): Refugee experience in the songs of the Zollhausboys” (Chap. 5), focuses on two performances where unaccompanied minors stage acts of belonging. She reads song lyrics by four of these young men, and relates the autobiographical performance enacted in an interview situation with one of them, Ismaeel. Pursing her project, Farhan finds that the two forms of narrating versions of home—song lyrics and the interview situation—complement each other. Drawing on the recent UK-based theatre project, Migrations: Harbour Europe, Szabolcs Musca’s chapter, “Migrant and Radical: Political Migrant Theatre and Activism in Migrations: Harbour Europe” (Chap. 6), examines migrant theatre initiatives that practice resistance, political responsiveness and solidarity while resisting established narratives and fostering new aesthetics of migration and refugeedom. Migrations: Harbour Europe project was developed by the migrant theatre collective Legal Aliens Theatre in collaboration with Migrant Dramaturgies Network. Musca argues that Migrations: Harbour Europe functions as a site for public discourse, positioning migrant identities and experiences firmly in the socio-political realm and advocating a rethinking of contemporary societies as migration societies in which asylum-seeking and refugeedom are structural issues rather than temporary “crises.” In her chapter, “On the necropolitics of contemporary human uprootedness: Ecocentric empathy in documentary film and philosophy” (Chap. 7), Graça P. Corrêa analyses documentary film aesthetics, arguing that the human uprootedness—of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and

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internally displaced people—reveals a necropolitics in action that may be viewed ecocritically. Reflecting on humans that have been displaced by war and by climate change, as well as the effects of global capitalism and “slow violence,” the chapter analyses documentaries, such as Michael Nash’s Climate Refugees (2010), Daphne Matziaraki’s 4.1 miles (2016), Kalyanee Mam’s Lost World (2018), as well as Godfrey Reggio’s more “abstract” Powaqqatsi (1988), to uncover an ecocentric empathy and aesthetics of affect within an ecocritical and necropolitical understanding. The final section, “The Refugee Novel,” focuses on literary aesthetics, both in the form of the novel and through comparisons revealing alternative histories and genealogies. Alexandra Christian Budny’s chapter, “Splitting Apart, Coming Together: Bildung (… shards …) into Mosaic-­ Being through Performance of the Refugee and Forced-Migration Bildungsroman” (Chap. 8), argues for the Refugee and Forced Migration Bildungsroman as a literary form specially suited to alternative representations of refugeedom. Using Ismet Prcic’s novel (… shards …) as a singularly illustrative model of the form, narratological strategy and the literary-aesthetic become the means through which the Refugee and Forced Migration subject releases, expresses, and connects the pieces of refugee experience which would otherwise be denied, sublimated, or rejected by dominant systems & (of) discourse. The Refugee and Forced Migration Bildungsroman, as this chapter shows, in a dizzying display of postmodern and metafictive techniques, demands of the reader a loosening of control, and a radical inhabitance, which brings the possibilities of imaginative empathy to its extremes. Gorica Majstorovic’s chapter, “Shattered Forms: Transnational Migration Literatures in Melilla and the Balkan Refugee Route” (Chap. 9), focuses on the fragmented subjectivities created by texts set at two gates of Europe, the Spanish-Moroccan and Romanian-Hungarian borders. Discussing Avila Laurél’s novel The Gurugu Pledge (2017) and Hassan Blasim’s short story “Why Don’t You Write a Story instead of Talking About All These Characters,” she argues for an aesthetics of fragmentation forwarded by migrant literature. Such strategies of fragmentation reflect the complicated histories of these texts’ dissemination, predicated on translation from Spanish and Arabic into English and published in the Global North—undermining the dominance of a self-­ contained Anglosphere and pointing to South-South solidarities. Mona Becker’s chapter, “‘Slowly Into Darkness’: Postmemory in Alison Pick’s Far to Go and Natasha Solomons’ Mr Rosenblum’s List” (Chap. 10),

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analyses two contemporary novels of the “postmemory” generation depicting the Kindertransporte: Alison Pick’s Far to Go (2010) and Natasha Solomons’s bestselling novel Mr Rosenblum’s List: or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman (2010). Through analysis of these two “postmemory” novels, Becker discusses the representation of Jewish refugees in twenty-first century literature, in which narratives of past and present belonging are constructed through sharing—or refusing to share—trauma and memory. Chinmaya Lal Thakur’s chapter, “Responding to Refugee Children: Transfigurations of Genre and Form in Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends and Lost Children Archive” (Chap. 11), demonstrates a connection between depictions of children’s agency and the undoing of form in Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli’s essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017) and her novel Lost Children Archive (2019). Luiselli’s essay and novel, he observes, overtly refuse the conventions of their respective genres. Such an undoing of form and genre, Thakur posits, stems from the attempt to represent the experiences of child refugees, specifically unaccompanied minors attempting to cross the US-Mexico border. Crucially, Thakur emphasizes, form is not a given but a potential that manifests as it comes into being, conjured when a plot has come to its conclusion.

References Anderson, Linda. 2001. Autobiography. Routledge. Berlant, Lauren, ed. 2004. Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. Routledge. ———. 2018. Genre Flailing. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry. 1 (2): 156–162. Bernard, Anna. 2020. Genres of Refugee Writing. In Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities, ed. Emma Cox, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Agnes Woolley, 65–82. Edinburgh University Press. Brouillette, Sarah. 2007. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Palgrave Macmillan. Bui, Long. 2016. The Refugee Repertoire: Performing and Staging the Postmemories of Violence. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 41 (3): 112–132. Caleshu, Anthony and Rory Waterman, eds. 2021. Poetry and Covid-19 An Anthology of Contemporary International and Collaborative Poetry. Shearsman Books.

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Cox, Emma, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Agnes Woolley, eds. 2020. Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities. Edinburgh University Press. Elliot, Jane, and Gillian Harkins. 2013. Introduction: Genres of Neoliberalism. Social Text 31 (2): 1–17. Espiritu, Yến Lê. 2014. Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees. University of California Press. Goyal, Yogita. 2020. ‘We Are All Migrants’: The Refugee Novel and the Claims of Universalism. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 66 (2): 239–259. Herd, David. 2016. Prologue. In Refugee tales, ed. David Herd and Anna Pincus, v–ix. Comma Press. Huggan, Graham. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. Routledge. Hunt, Lynn A. 2007. Inventing Human Rights: A History. W.W.  Norton & Company. Jeffers, Alison. 2011. Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities. Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, Barbara. 1998. Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law. Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10 (2): 549–574. Luckhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. Routledge. Malkki, Liisa H. 1995. Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 495–523. ———. 1996. Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization. Cultural Anthropology 11 (3): 377–404. Mayblin, Lucy. 2017. Asylum after Empire: Colonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking. Roman & Littlefield International. Miller, Jen A. 2020. Why You Should Start a Coronavirus Diary. New York Times, April 13. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/smarter-­living/why-­you-­ should-­start-­a-­coronavirus-­diary.html. Moore, Alexandra S., and Samantha Pinto. 2020. Beyond Sovereignty: New Cultural Imaginaries of Human Rights. In Writing Beyond the State: Post-­ Sovereign Approaches to Human Rights in Literary Studies, ed. Alexandra S. Moore and Samantha Pinto, 1–18. Palgrave Macmillan. Moretti, Franco. 2005. Graphs, Maps, Trees. Verso. Nayar, Pramod K. 2021. The Human Rights Graphic Novel: Drawing it Just Right. Routledge. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. 2018. Introduction. In The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, ed. Viet Thanh Nguyen, 11–22. Abrams Press. Nguyen, Marguerite, and Catherine Fung. 2016. Editor’s Introduction: Refugee Cultures: Forty Years after the Vietnam War. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 41 (3): 1–7. Nyers, Peter. 2006. Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency. Routledge.

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Owen, Stephen. 2007. Genres in Motion. PMLA 122 (5): 1389–1393. Potter, Rachel, and Lyndsey Stonebridge. 2014. Writing and Rights. Critical Quarterly 56 (4): 1–16. Rifkind, Candida. 2020. Migrant Detention Comics and the Aesthetic Technologies of Compassion. In Documenting Trauma in Comics, ed. Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, 297–316. Palgrave Macmillan. Slaughter, Joseph. 2007. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. Fordham University Press. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. University of Minnesota Press. Stonebridge, Lyndsey. 2018. Place People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees. Oxford University Press. Swanson, Goldberg, Alexandra Schultheis Elizabeth, and Moore and Greg Mullins. 2013. Introduction: On Texts and Performatics. College Literature 40 (3): 9–14. Vogl, Anthea. 2013. Telling Stories from Start to Finish. Griffith Law Review 22 (1): 63–86. Whitlock, Gillian. 2015. Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford University Press. Woolley, Agnes. 2020. Docu/Fiction and the Aesthetics of the Border. In Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities, ed. Emma Cox, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Agnes Woolley, 146–164. Edinburgh University Press.

Open Access  This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

PART I

Life Writing: Memoir, Comics, Poetry

CHAPTER 2

“How Do we Survive the Memory of So Much Waiting?”: Reconfiguring Empathy in Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee Sheila Ghose

I hear them say, go home, I hear them say, fucking immigrants, fucking refugees. Are they really this arrogant? Do they not know that stability is like a lover with a sweet mouth upon your body one second and the next you are a tremor lying on the floor covered in rubble and old currency waiting for its return. All I can say is, I was once like you, the apathy, the pity, the ungrateful placement and now my home is the mouth of a shark, now my home is the barrel of a gun. I’ll see you on the other side. (Shire 2011, 24)

“Ungrateful placement”: ingratitude is the privilege of the ones who unthinkingly presume they have rightful and natural claims to a place, and the privilege to displace refugees once again by abusing the very notion of

S. Ghose (*) School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Classon Frangos, S. Ghose (eds.), Refugee Genres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2_2

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home in their complacency by hurling “go home.” But as the speaker of Warshan Shire’s poem points out, the refugee cannot choose to return when their home has become “the mouth of a shark.” Gratitude, on the other hand, paradoxically, is what the refugee is supposed to display, in the face of insults, or indeed, humanitarian intervention. But, the speaker warns us, home itself is an illusory notion; it can change, from one moment to another. The speaker thus turns the idea of home on the complacent, sending a warning, with the image of love versus violence. Love, the warm embrace of home, is not something we can take for granted. And, one could ask, does not the rejection of the other also betray an underlying anxiety about home and belonging? In The Ungrateful Refugee, Dina Nayeri, meditating on refugeedom, undoes illusions of home under the sign of ingratitude, turning the ingratitude of the complacent back on themselves in refusing their definitions of belonging. By blurring the conventions of autobiographical narration, she bypasses the conventional story of individual development, and instead pushes for us to try to understand the precariousness of taking for granted what Shire calls “stability.” She looks to forms in which to write about refugeedom, specifically, to give shape to the ephemeral nature of home, of the fact that it can be upended in unexpected, possibly violent ways. Nayeri ambivalently tries to understand her own history as an asylum seeker and refugee and traces the ways it made her into a writer. She finds herself circling back to, again and again, her childhood experience of the “limbo” (2019, 117) of the former Italian refugee camp Barba. Reflecting on her fellow asylum seekers’ strategies for enduring camp life, she asks, “How do we survive the memory of so much waiting?” (124). Waiting, after all, is the painful, demeaning condition of asylum seeking, the anteroom of citizenship. How can she tell the story of those who are waiting (and is she perhaps also still waiting, in a way) to have conferred on them the status of full membership in humanity: that of being a citizen? Nayeri finds that she can only uneasily inhabit her role as storyteller and writer. Importantly, in her question, she includes herself in a “we”: in facing the challenge of giving shape to the experience of mass statelessness, she discovers that her story must be told as one of a collective. She presents hers as one of many refugee stories, each unique, yet beholden to the rigid scripts prescribed by the contemporary international regime of asylum politics. Nayeri tells the stories of her mother, her grandmother, her brother, refugee camp dwellers. She meets volunteer workers, immigration lawyers, representatives of humanitarian organizations, and council workers.

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Through constant reflections on the difficulties of narration, on the nature of memory and the multiplicity of perspectives, Nayeri constructs her own life narrative as intertwined with the stories of her fellow refugees. In the end, she grapples with the possibility that, in Edward Said’s words, “on the twentieth-century scale, exile is neither aesthetically nor humanistically comprehensible” (Said 2000, 174). Her way of navigating this dilemma  is to propose, obsessively, compulsively, that we (re)visit the camp to experience the powerlessness of waiting, and perhaps start from a less comfortable position than that offered by the asymmetrical structure of empathy. She cannot provide us with resolutions; Barba emerges as an untranslatable element in her story, complicating her role as storyteller, as chronicler of refugeedom. In the end, she finds that Barba functions as a productive element in what amounts to a resistance narrative of interrupted Bildung that enables her to claim non-hegemonic forms of what she calls “dignity.” Through her narrative choices, Nayeri in effect challenges the prevailing discourse of gratitude, which stipulates that the refugee should be thankful for the “host” nation’s humanitarian gesture of granting asylum. Nayeri rejects this obligation to be grateful despite the fact that, as Carolina Moulin points out, if the asylum seeker or refugee does not enter into this discourse, they cannot be welcomed into a nation. Moulin, in the vein of Peter Nyers, points out that in our contemporary world order, the figure of the grateful refugee is crucial to the model for good citizenship. With reference to Hannah Arendt, she claims that the refugee is “a mobile referent, an ‘other’ upon whom the idea of proper citizenship depends” (Moulin 2012, 55). In fact, she points out, “without refugees and the corrective mechanisms put in motion by the international refugee regime, citizenship would not have become the ‘normal’ model of belonging in contemporary democratic societies” (Moulin 2012, 55). And importantly, a certain kind of refugee is required for this formation: the grateful, “good” refugee. Such refugees can be—conditionally—folded into a national discourse. By being ungrateful, they take the risk of being denied full membership. Moulin succinctly sums up her argument thus: “Protection+gratutide=refugee (humanitarian subject)/ Liberty+autonomy=not refugee (political subject)” (2012, 63). The gratitude the refugee is expected to display affords them a degree of protection, but also renders them vulnerable to xenophobic discourses. In contrast, by demanding rights, being an “active, demanding” (Moulin 2012, 55) subject, the refugee exits the realm of humanitarian discourse.

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Such a move is precarious as this ungrateful subject challenges the idea of the good citizen. Ungratefulness leaves them in the cold. Throughout her book, Nayeri defiantly throws into relief this dilemma. Rejecting the foundational premise of humanitarianism, visible in the organization of refugee camps, she travels the contemporary refugee circuits to gather the stories of refugees and asylum seekers. She thereby enacts a restless repetition prompted by her life-long feeling of never really feeling settled, able to belong, and in the process, invites the reader to enter these routes and confront the cruelty of the international refugee regime. Driven by her life-long lingering sense of displacement, Nayeri returns to Barba, or to what Barba represents. She knows well that seizing her childhood camp experience is futile, and yet she goes there as an adult to discover, to her consternation, the transformation of it into a perfectly comfortable, even luxurious hotel. How can she now rejoin Barba’s precarious community, the inhabitants’ “limbo”? She comes to the realization that attempting to return to Barba “isn’t displacement anymore. It’s a compulsion” (Nayeri 2019, 183). This compulsive impulse then drives her to, among other places, the Greek refugee camps LM Village and Katiskas to try to give voice to the displaced there. In doing so, she negotiates the risks of appropriation, of subordinating their stories to her own. Acknowledging the impossibility of her own return to Barba, of reclaiming and recreating her memories and experiences, she also realizes that this place of stasis prompted her to become a creative writer; in her book, the camp emerges as a creative void that enables her to trace some kind of origin story for herself, through her ability to witness, to speak from memory, or perhaps even invent. Maybe she could find some success stories? Would that redeem the “limbo” of waiting? Or is it the difficulty of answering such questions that drives her to these camps? While interweaving her own stories with the camp-dwellers’, she realizes that this void creates the possibility for her to listen to and fraternize with them. The camp cannot be easily translated, explained, represented; it retains, for her, an untranslatable quality that resists appropriation. In the process, she also understands the importance of being “ungrateful,”  and that storytelling about the camp does not have to rely on the conventional logic of humanitarianism.

The Pain of Others In her refusal of gratitude, Nayeri veers away from eliciting a liberal mode of empathy from the reader, and thereby hits on a conundrum that has been the focus of criticism in contemporary discourses of representations

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of refugees. For instance, what forms of autobiographical narration, or life writing, could be available for the ungrateful subject? How could they possibly evade the constraints of hegemonic genre conventions forming them as a recognizable figure of humanitarian intervention? Edward Said strenuously rejects the compulsion to adhere to such constraints, pointing out, with regard to the “exile”: … exile cannot be made to serve notions of humanism … at most, the literature about exile objectifies an anguish and a predicament people most rarely experience first hand; but to think of the exile informing this literature as basically humanistic is to banalize its mutilations, the losses it inflicts to any attempt to understand it as “good for us.” (Said 2000, 174)

In underscoring that most people won’t experience the suffering of the displaced person intimately, Said condemns the kind of storytelling that allows us to step into the shoes of the refugee, or the person forced into exile, which depends on the idea of a shared sense of humanity. This kind of empathetic identification, in fact, is not a mode of caring, but actually a violation of the involuntary migrant’s pain. Of particular relevance to the kind of autobiographical storytelling that Nayeri is grappling with is the genre of the Bildungsroman. Scholars have explored the importance of this genre that through its hegemonic status has contributed to the formation of the present neoliberal world order, where empathy can function instrumentally to uphold global inequalities. Joseph Slaughter has famously theorized that the Bildungsroman has provided a model for the modern, notably European or Western, subject of rights. This model of personhood, he proposes, has set a foundation for the modern discourse of rights, expressed perhaps most clearly in the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which, he shows, were formulated in part through a discussion of Robinson Crusoe. (Slaughter 2007, 47–51). Examining Hannah Arendt’s use of fiction to understand refugee narratives, Lyndsey Stonebridge argues that Arendt explored a kind of writing that does not depend on an audience’s empathetic listening, on “horrified humanitarianism” (Dorothy Thompson qtd. in Stonebridge 2018, 3). Herself a refugee, Arendt claimed that articulating statelessness requires a different sort of narrative than the kind promoted by the drafting of the Declaration of Human Rights, which harked back to the subjectivity modelled on the classic Bildungsroman, and which, as a product of modernity, was tied to forms of national citizenship. For Arendt, as

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Stonebridge explains, “the task was to forge a style capable of responding to the new rightlessness” (20). Arendt could, in fact, perceive alternative “forms of imagining” (20) starting to emerge, ones that would undermine the nationalist paradigm. Such forms would reject the humanization of the stateless through, for instance, the modernist literature of exile. Central to Arendt’s view of a writing of statelessness is that testimonials of suffering must also trigger action, which is to say that “empathetic listening” (Stonebridge 2018, 69), or finding shared values beyond national borders, is not enough for the new kind of writing of modern statelessness. Such imaginative writing should instead be a way of working out what it means to be human, and having rights, through constant negotiation with others. New sorts of narratives must be forged that do not fall victim to the illusion that stories of humanity and dignity presented in, for instance, the humanist Bildung narrative can provide a model for the stateless. Such stories, in fact, rob them of dignity by obscuring their condition—a view thus shared by both Said and Arendt. Such a focus on the affective dimension of communicating statelessness dovetails with what Carolyn Pedwell, in challenging conventional understandings of empathy, terms “affective translation” (2014, 119). Pedwell proposes that complete understanding of the other is never possible, and, crucially, that this is not a detrimental thing. Acknowledging this incompleteness forces us to open up to the other. Pedwell looks to ways in which we can exercise empathy without being drafted into the present neocolonial and neoliberal world order, where empathy can be deployed as an instrument of power; such is, of course, the world that traps refugees in unending asylum processes and the limbo of the camps. Testing the possibilities of empathy to effect change in a contemporary transnational context, she comes up against instrumental, hierarchical configurations of empathy presupposing that understanding the other can lead towards an end product of sorts, the result of a teleological, linear process that leads towards a “peaceful, harmonious, and equitable future” (2014,  111). Such views of empathy emphasize accuracy: empathy is achieved through the empathizer trying to accurately gauge the feelings of another, and only when compatibility is arrived at does genuine empathy arise. Such is the nature of liberal views of empathy: the classic notion of stepping into someone’s shoes (which, thus, could entail stealing those shoes). Empathy in this form is envisioned as the universal solution to social injustice, and understanding can occur through rational debate. This presupposes,

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however, some kind of equality, in terms of who is listened to, and who is allowed to speak. Pedwell proposes alternative, more egalitarian ways to work towards social justice in transnational contexts. Instead of presupposing that we can accurately understand the other, we must recognize that exercising empathy is a process, and inherently a relation characterized by conflict. Understanding this paves the way for “a potential openness to being affected and transformed by what is encountered as ‘foreign’ in the midst of shifting transnational circuits and connectivities” (2014, 121). In fact, Pedwell suggests, we might need to look to other models for transnational communication and understanding. She proposes instead that we pay attention to the affective as well as political aspects that bind us to one another, rendering us open to being affected by others, human and non-­ human entities. Pedwell turns to translation, which compels us to open up to the other, to try to understand and recreate the worldview of another. She admits that translation can be used for the purpose of controlling a colonized other, but can also function subversively, with the underserved or subaltern being able claim to agency through repeating with a difference, never quite replicating the presumed original suppositions pressed on them from above (Pedwell 2014, 130–131). Notably, she points out, cultures and languages are in fact inherently hybrid, colonized or not, so the idea that there would be a stable origin text that can be replicated is a spurious notion in itself. Instead, we can speak of “assemblages” of ongoing processes, linguistic, textual, affective, never quite stable, and therefore “not fully amenable to intentionality, control or manipulation” (Pedwell 2014, 131). Translation, therefore, is an impure process which leaves traces of something not quite understood or resolved, a contamination. Pedwell, in effect, advocates for liberal modes of empathy giving way to an attunement to otherness that exceeds the strictures of a neoliberal and neocolonial world order. She raises the question of whether empathy is even a useful notion to understand transnational relations, with its baggage. What is clear is that empathy is historically, geographically, culturally, and socially determined, moving through an “apparatus” (2014, 173), and therefore not an organic emotion per se. Turning to translation as an affective act forces attention to the complexities of such determining factors, an attunement to the different ways we are positioned with relation to the present global regime. She highlights Spivak’s idea of translation as “the most intimate act of reading” (Spivak qtd. in Pedwell 2014, 132), an

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affective relation in which one must make oneself vulnerable through relinquishing any illusions of mastery in order to live with the foreign. Central to such an act is, of course, imagination: embarking on the course of metaphorical travel. Lauren Berlant brings attention to the fact that, with modernity, the capacity to feel another’s pain has been increasingly premised not only on our relation to proximate others, but to those far away who are rendered visible to us through mass media. In fact, she proposes, the formation of the modern liberal state is intertwined with the rise of progressive phenomena like abolitionist and feminist campaigns, which required citizens to be able to feel the pain of others (notably, however, only in relation to “worthy,” humanitarian subjects). As Berlant puts it, “The universalization of pain made a new pathway to citizenship” (2016, 51). A proper and virtuous citizen (and nation) exhibits humanitarian impulses. However, Berlant also points out the potential pitfalls of such an approach, noticeable, for instance, when we are asked to feel the mediated suffering of others, and thereby engage with aesthetic aspects, such as generical conventions of fictional as well as documentary texts. This is particularly poignant as, she asserts, we harbour a desire for documentary realness at the heart of these texts. She asks, somewhat ominously, what this modern imperative to feel others’ pain—she focuses mainly on compassion1— entails, if we, with our “reality hunger,” to use David Shield’s term, are to be attuned to it while also being on some level entertained through the spectacles of mass mediation. Like Pedwell, Berlant emphasizes that compassion—which applies also to empathy—is a “social and aesthetic technology of belonging” (2004, 5), a result of “social training” (7), emerging in no way straightforwardly, but in compromised, contradictory, anxiety-­ridden ways. The privileged subject being able to choose whether 1  Regarding the relationship between compassion and empathy, Marjorie Garber points to the fact that empathy is a modern term, minted in the early twentieth century, whereas compassion has been used for centuries. Compassion, Garber explains, carries, historically and today, connotations of charity and condescension. Empathy, on the other hand, promotes an updated ideal of egalitarianism regarding the ability to feel the pain of others; the empathetic person has “the power of projecting one’s personality into the object of contemplation” (Garber 2004, 24). An empathetic person is to be congratulated on harbouring “fine feelings” (24), whereas the person showing compassion is “motivated by values and precepts, often those learned from religion, philosophy or politics” (24). Both affects are nevertheless products of social education, relying on learnt ways of responding to the pain of fellow human beings, and, as Pedwell demonstrates, empathy, too, carries with it dangers of structural inequality.

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to feel or withdraw compassion is, in short, not an unambiguous process, but cause for unease, and to a large extent dependent on our reliance on the formal constraints and possibilities of mediation. Feeling compassion is a sign of good citizenship, but it is a fraught process where the privileged subject must negotiate how much fellow-feeling they actually want to extend and to whom—how to deal with the often distant other (we might recall Said’s reminder that the displaced person’s “anguish” is a “predicament people most rarely experience first hand”). Berlant asks, chillingly, “What if it turns out that compassion and coldness are not opposite at all but are two sides of a bargain that the subjects of modernity have struck with structural inequality?” (10).

The Untranslatable Element Nayeri’s experience of flight begins at the age of nine, when she, her mother—a Christian convert—and her brother are forced to hastily leave their beloved home in Iran to end up, in 1989, in Oklahoma. She describes her frustration and rage at her loss of dignity, the powerlessness of being dependent on and defined by others. Looking to escape her classmates’ bullying—calling her “cat-eater,” “terrorist,” “camel fucker” (2019, 201)—as well as her teachers’ more underhanded racism, she starts looking for a way to, once more, flee persecution: “I began looking forward again. Oklahoma wasn’t a promised land. It was hot and mediocre and lazy. And I could never satisfy these people” (2019, 203). In plotting a different kind of future for herself, one in which she can make her own decisions, she has a revelation when she, “itchy and angry and … eleven” (2019, 204), comes across a university entrance book in the local library. She decides to instrumentally make her way through the US education system to ascend its pinnacle: Harvard. This, she decides, will offer her a chance to claim dignity (she eventually goes to both Princeton and Harvard). Minutely planning her path to success, she studies entrance requirements and notes the importance of extracurricular activities. She enrols in a martial arts course and subjects her body to a punishing regime to become a champion, only to abandon it when she has won her last tournament. Her coach is shocked when she quits; nevertheless, she never had the passion for the sport. She has added another qualification to her university application in her single-minded focus on ridding herself of powerlessness, concrete proof of which is her rock-hard body and shiny medals.

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Nayeri repeatedly tries to convey different aspects of dignity throughout the book. She describes dressing down to help serve food at a shelter in New York City so as not to humiliate the visitors, as opposed to her office mates, who spend the day there dressed in haute couture. She also explains the setup of a store in LM Village—run by the organization Refugee support—where the camp inhabitants can “buy” donated foodstuffs  through a points system; they can  thereby avoid the humiliating feeling of being completely reliant on charity. Paul, a volunteer, comments, “You know what I love? When they complain about the selection. Because that means that they’ve forgotten they’re in a camp” (2019, 126). But the ultimate affront to “dignity,” she states, is “to be made to wait” (2019,  118)—which, of course, is a state that complicates emplotment, autobiographical or other. Nayeri makes it clear in her book that dignity, bound up with reclaiming agency, is dependent on escaping waiting; yet, as we have seen, she cannot really leave Barba behind. In reclaiming agency, eleven-year-old Dina starts on an arc of Bildung proper, the word evoking “education”: she describes going from enduring racism at school in spite of the fact that she, the “poor refugee,” actually gained mathematical skills in Iran superior to those of her American classmates, to making her way to the highest rungs of education in the US. However, now that she has achieved her goal of assimilation, supposedly, fulfilled the Bildung process—what challenges might the Bildung form present for her to tell the story of refugeedom? What kind of agency does Nayeri create for herself in her quest for dignity? Barba, a place of stasis presents an impediment for a fulfilled Bildung arc, prompting the question of what kind of refugee subject Nayeri traces, and, in the end, where agency lies. Compulsively seeking to “return” to Barba, Nayeri, in short, interrupts the progress narrative of Bildung, and she thereby avoids being co-opted as a grateful humanitarian subject. The imperative to put  the refugee’s pain on display for the political subject, the citizen, has been taken up by humanitarian organizations, which disseminate films, pictures, and narratives in efforts to raise funds and awareness. However, taking into account Nayeri’s resistance narrative, we could say that such undertakings  risk amounting  to mastery, elicit a hegemonic sort of empathetic identification. This  could obviously  play into what Berlant proposes regarding modernity’s “bargain”: that indifference, cruelty, or even sadism could be tied to  the modern virtuous citizen’s capacity for  feeling the pain of “worthy” others.

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In The Ungrateful Refugee, in other words, dignity begins to take on a quality of resistance. The book takes this basic aspect of human rights, evoking the Universal Human Rights Declaration’s recognition of “dignity” as a fundamental right for any “member of the human family,”2 and inserts it into the discourse of ingratitude. Nayeri turns to the genre conventions of the Western story of individual development available to her, and to the audience she is addressing, the Western reader and spectator, lamenting, for example, with respect to asylum officers, “we assign our least talented, most cynical bureaucrats to be the arbiters of complicated truth, not instructing them to save lives, or search out the weary and the hopeless, but to root out lies, to protect our fat entitlements, our space, at any moral cost (2019, 10–11). Here, in the beginning of her book, she implicates herself, with the pronoun “we,” in this Western regime of cruelty, as a Westerner, an assimilated Iranian American—and then spends the rest of the book asking how assimilated she really is and what this means, as well as investigating her own and other refugees’ and asylum seekers’ positions within this regime, and the choices available for them when cast as humanitarian subjects who should display gratitude. Ungratefulness, she demonstrates, is the way to achieve dignity, and claim agency, on the refugee’s own terms. But above all, Nayeri includes herself in a collective of refugees and asylum seekers when telling her story of interrupted Bildung. She grapples with the dilemma of giving shape to a personal as well as official history by telling her own story and giving voice to those of others. Barba opened up the possibility that her self-narration can perhaps only take place through others. She constantly strains against the restraints of autobiography, skirting the refugee success-narrative. This is partly done through the incorporation of others’ stories, but also through constant self-reflection— on the process of writing and speaking, as a witness, on behalf of herself as well as others. For all her focus on personal educational success, it becomes clear to her that the established Bildung plot relies on an individual’s development, albeit in relation to society, which cannot be done when giving shape to refugee subjectivity. Writing about the impossibility of 2  The word “dignity” is mentioned in first lines of the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948): “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world...” (https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-humanrights)

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returning to Barba, and how it drives the whole project of her autobiographical narration, Nayeri indeed discovers a state of being that troubles the ideal of “world citizenship.” The refugee is the stranger that exposes the modern order of nations as a sham, leaving more than 70 million people, at this time, vulnerable. Recognizing that Barba is an untranslatable space allows her to begin exploring the possibility of using literature as a means to problematize the damaging, hegemonically determined connection between citizenship and gratitude. Emphasizing the impossibility of returning to Barba becomes for Nayeri a strategy for pushing against the privileged reader’s or spectator’s desire for the “reality” of refugee suffering. Looking for such realness, this subject could ostensibly engage with the pain of the other. Finding “the real,” here, means finding oneself: following Berlant’s reasoning, it becomes apparent that the reader or spectator is fortified as a citizen through this putative kind of identification. In resisting the citizen’s attempts to co-opt the figure of the refugee or asylum seeker by bestowing empathy—which for Berlant would be a narcissistic exercise—Nayeri instead holds out Barba as an unreal place of waiting and stasis—but, importantly, also of intimacy and community: My defence against unreality in those unmoving Barba days was the movement of other people. Atop that pretty hill, I saw a universe of others, with personalities, secrets, dramas as rich and consequential as mine, battering parallel walls that extended out to the edge of the earth. I learned to care about their stories and the aftermath of those stories. I learned that some stories are a joy to embellish and recreate (as in literature and gossip) and in others, the facts are vital (as in fights with brothers, or asylum interviews) and that to believe or not to believe, the “how” of the story matters in both cases. (2019, 119)

In watching the campmates, she concludes that in the end, the “how,” the form or style in which refugee stories are told define them. Again, it is through the unreality and unnaturalness of waiting that she begins understanding the ways in which writing and storytelling are a matter of survival, when at the mercy of others, such as asylum officers, or in cohabitation in the forced collective of the camp. She also realizes that hers is one of many stories in this complex space of drama, boredom and secrets. Her compulsion to grasp what Hotel Barba signifies shows her need to understand her chronic existential displacement through the multitude of

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refugee stories around her, pointing to the vast sea of refugee stories that could be told. Her experience of living close, being part of a community of waiting and anticipation in Barba, lays the groundwork for writing her collective autobiography. As such, her text foregrounds a political struggle of a group as well as that of an individual in the face of oppression. However, giving shape to life in camps isn’t easy. Crucially, how can she for example tell the stories of the inhabitants of LM Village and Katsikas, as well as of Barba, without robbing them of agency? She reflects on the camp-dwellers’ attempts at normalcy and maintaining dignity in the face of this exceptional state of existence, of boredom and desperation, of uncertainty whether it will ever end. Nayeri muses: … a refugee is the most abject creature of all, stateless, homeless, without control over her own food, education or health. Asylum seekers is so mild a phrase—we weren’t politely seeking, we were ravenous for it, this creature need for the safety of our bodies. Even as we learned English and swam and erased notebooks, we thought of nothing else. How do we survive the memory of so much waiting? (2019, 124)

Waiting, it seems, is a loss of control—but in this case also one of ravenous, corporeal desire; it is not a state of inertia. Nayeri manages at the same time to underscore the powerlessness of Barba’s inhabitants and their visceral resistance to such a passive state as they constantly look to escape, which puts them at odds with the benevolent humanitarian administrative discourse keeping them safe and alive. Waiting, in other words, is multilayered, entailing humiliation, being at the mercy of others, but also, a state of dormant agency. From her insider perspective Nayeri, thus, negotiates the representational challenges presented by on the one hand giving shape to the complexities of waiting, and on the other, the ways in which people in the camp are also active, participatory subjects. She is of course not alone in having to negotiate this problem; as Madelaine Hron points out, with reference to documentary filmmaking, the filmmaker must present a narrative of sorts while also giving shape to “the dehumanization that encampment engenders” (2020, 340). This raises the question of the nature of narrativization: must it not entail some kind of emplotment? How is it possible to narrate the raw, painful state of anticipation in the camp? What kind of narrative strategies must a filmmaker or writer invent? And how can waiting in itself perhaps prompt narrativization?

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In the text, Nayeri realizes that it was precisely this question of representing the camp that made her into a writer. She tells an illustrative story of the ungrateful Romanians, the subject of much gossip and moral outrage in Barba, about a love triangle involving an escape from the camp and a humiliating return. A loving husband finds cash-paying work to provide his wife with extravagant presents, while the wife flirts and elopes with a younger, guitar-strumming fellow countryman, only to be sent back from the Swiss border, mortified. Nayeri is fascinated as she recalls these campmates’ refusal to accept their circumstances, claiming what little agency they could. Like everyone else in the camp, Dina watches them carefully, and looking back, she realizes what they taught her about storytelling and survival. Recalling being captivated by their drama, she reflects: What was clear then: by watching I could choose who I wanted to be, or seem to be, and I could be believed. I could tell my own story convincingly, by convincing myself, by making it true. I could put an end to every wait. That’s the allure of the Romanians’ story—they decided simply to stop waiting; they defied the orders not to move. They remade themselves, deliberately. Is a thing less true, if you have consciously made it so? (2019, 119)

She summarizes this life lesson succinctly: “Limbo is temptation itself— the itch to make life happen” (2019, 117). The Ungrateful Refugee here comments on its own project: Barba was not just the space of waiting and stasis, but also where she discovered she could survive through telling stories—significantly, through watching others, something she continues throughout her book, this project of autobiographical self-creation. The Romanians showed her that one can resist, perhaps shape one’s own stories, though it doesn’t quite end well for them. Through them Nayeri finds a way to narrate the ways in which the camp, as a place of waiting and even dehumanization, could engender stories that involve struggles for agency, and at least the semblance of a plot. Emplotment is engendered, for example, as the campmates spin a tale around these defiant lovers out of their own complicated feelings regarding this momentary but hugely important event. There are of course many recognizable plot elements here: impossible love, betrayal, and the rightful downfall of treacherousness. The camp inhabitants’ narrative talents emerge in tension with stories about them as powerless. Poignantly, it turns out the Romanians, in the end, still end up eating together in the camp canteen and generally spending time in each other’s company, still in the camp. So

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what kind of ending does their narrative actually present, if they still repeat their earlier patterns of camp life? They did, however, in any case attempt to create their own story in defiance of forced inactivity. Nayeri’s book, in this way, can be said to evoke Nando Sigona’s term “campzenship,” which indicates a kind of agency the refugee camp inhabitants can claim or create for themselves, a “situated form of membership produced in and by the camp, the complex and ambivalent relationship of its inhabitants with the camp and the ways the camp shapes the relationship of its inhabitants with the state and their capacity and modes of being political” (2015, 1). He finds Agamben’s famous proposition that the camp consists of a state of exception that reduces its inhabitants to “bare life” too absolute and disempowering; he does not deny the severe constraints of rightlessness, but holds out the ways in which camp inhabitants negotiate the workings of state power, like bureaucracy and asylum policies, as well as develop their own strategies for adaptation and social interaction. Nayeri describes the residents of Barba desperately waiting by their mail cubbies to get word of their asylum applications, but also being picky about and sharing food. What is clear is that they all find their own ways to handle their limbo, “ravenous” for asylum, but, importantly, are able to also lay claim to a political kind of subjecthood, going beyond the humanitarian paradigm, each in their own way. Nayeri repeatedly reflects on her struggles with the possibilities of, but also heavy constraints on, creating narratives about Barba, LM Village and Katsikas. If an asylum narrative must be told in certain formats to be believed, by asylum officers but also a wider audience trained in bestowing hegemonic modes of empathy, how does she then avoid the discourse of humanitarian benevolence, which in itself is at odds, yet complicit with the cruel international asylum regime? The asylum-seeking process requires that asylum seekers tell stories that prove they are real and worthy subjects that can show real pain and suffering. The asylum officers could be said to harbour their own version of “reality hunger.” They are agents designated to police the boundaries between the citizen and its other, tasked with seeking out “real” suffering, looking for bodily signs of pain endured or being endured, or fear and anxiety displayed. Nayeri traces the impasses and tortuousness of constructing credible asylum narratives, detailing the near-hopeless repetitiveness of forging the official asylum story to be put to the immigration authorities, the one that will afford one, finally, protection of a nation. Often, truth here matters less than presentation. Presentation can be doctored to suit the perceived current “successful”

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one: persecution on religious grounds, sexuality, for instance. These stories often appear in clusters, foregrounding one of these aspects, and when they are presented repeatedly, the applicants are suddenly disbelieved. However, Nayeri asks—what choice does the applicant have, when the “truth” of their story won’t suffice? She is then suddenly besieged by existential doubt when a friend of her mother’s admits to not really believing her family’s escape story, this fundamental existential narrative into which she was folded as a child. She begins considering different possible reasons for her mother’s escape: why did she convert so quickly (a miracle!)? Nayeri’s father was a substance abuser; what was her parents’ marriage like? What about the constraints for women in the aftermath of the Islamist revolution in 1979? In the end, even her own testimony stands on loose ground. She needs to write some kind of story, and believe in some kind of truth, even though it might be provisional, and The Ungrateful Refugee is one such text. In the process she makes clear that such an undertaking cannot give a privileged reader, like the citizen, a story that can satisfy their wish for realness, be able to look into the heart of the suffering subject. It is in the face of this kind of doubt that Nayeri becomes hesitant to weave a text that foregrounds hers as a success story, feeling compelled to weave the storytelling of others into her own. In different ways, these stories all speak of waiting, with its layers of painful anticipation and stasis, as a state where historical time, as bound up with that of the progress-­ narrative of the nation, is off-kilter. It is through their waiting that these people are existentially as well as bureaucratically bound to specific times and places, undocumented or documented asylum seekers struggling with the  imperative to tell officially “true” stories for their survival, which simultaneously becomes an exhausting exercise in claiming dignity. They are unable to progress nor turn back to from where they have escaped. Amongst them lurks the heroine of assimilation, the successful hardworking refugee—but Nayeri both is and is not this figure, able to publish and receive critical recognition, yet bound by Barba and what it represents to at all be able to create, to write. Nayeri has found that waiting places constraints on the possibility of a plot timeline. She is not only caught in the state of waiting, but also repetitiveness, outlining how asylum seeker storytelling repeats, in various ways, storylines that are similar, of camp life and of asylum applications, and the inherent mental and physical violence their waiting entails. In the end, this is why Nayeri is forced to bend the Bildung narrative arc to be able to convey the story of her own education and development; she offers us this

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story as a framework, one that we recognize and which offers us a measure of identification, but repeatedly leads us into stories of waiting as the anteroom of history. Importantly, finding ways of narrating differently, reclaiming waiting and thereby also to some extent repetitive looping, she engenders some measure of political agency for herself and her fellow refugees and for asylum seekers. With Barba as the central element that complicates the narrative of the grateful refugee, Nayeri’s exploration of the state of waiting evokes Pedwell’s notion of the misguided, or even oppressive, idea that there is an original element that can be translated—that translation would depend on a stable origin text. Barba’s complicated dynamic of stasis, anticipation, yet, narrative complexity, points, rather, to what Pedwell understands as unstable assemblages of ongoing processes impossible to fix. In this sense, the untranslatable element of Barba lies at the heart of the ungratefulness that Nayeri provocatively promotes in the book’s title. Barba thus constitutes a driving element in the story that enables her to interrupt the Bildung storyline and propose non-hegemonic ways to understand dignity. As she recalls, it was in the unrealness of waiting in Barba that she began understanding the power of imagination and creation, in her case writing, and in relation to others, observing her fellow campmates. Describing waiting as an ambiguous “unreal” state also implies that it is difficult to grasp—especially for the citizen hungering for the “real” suffering subject, worthy of their empathy.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have seen that compassion and empathy are central to the modern subject’s position with respect to nationhood and to citizenship. Nayeri’s book shows how genre is tied to citizenship and affect, which raises the uncomfortable notion that there are genre conventions that actually enable readers to generate “appropriate” measures and kinds of pain. Nayeri, however, points to ways in which these conventions can be put to work for other kinds of affective identification. She grapples with the autobiographical imperative to present the plot of individual development, interior as well as with regard to societal factors, in the process attempting to move the reader towards a practice of “affective translation” that leads onto the path of demanding and precarious dialogue. Making waiting visible to us, Nayeri forces us to ponder “geography, power and violence”—refugeedom is tied to affective relations and specific times and

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places. In this way, reconfiguring the well-worn conventions of autobiographical writing, Nayeri’s text begins responding to Arendt’s call to “forge a style capable of responding to the new rightlessness” (Stonebridge 2018, 20). In The Ungrateful Refugee, Nayeri writes while conscious of the risks of inviting a certain kind of empathetic listening that might strip her and other refugees of dignity. But Nayeri asserts her (and all refugees’) right to be ungrateful by foregrounding the inequality of such an imagined understanding and thereby resists inviting the type of liberal empathy that Arendt and Pedwell find so problematic. She provides a particularly striking illustration of such inequality, of patronizing benevolence, when observing the complicated work of humanitarian organizations, which, she muses, cannot handle the importance of dignity for refugees and convey their needs, and thereby risk perpetuating stereotypes about them. What could refugees want or need? In Katiskas, the camp-dwellers’ homes can best be described as shacks, and they live on rations. Yet, there is an abundance of one thing: teddy bears of all sizes, spilling out of donation bins. Nayeri describes the surrealness of entering homes in the camp to find the bears randomly placed everywhere, “in the kitchen, above the bedroom doorframes … nailed to every wall” (2019, 141). Apparently, this is what donors prioritize.

References Berlant, Lauren. 2004. Introduction. In Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Laurent Berlant, 1–14. Routledge. ———. 2016. The Epistemology of State Emotion. In Dissent in Dangerous Times, ed. Sarat Austin, 46–78. University of Michigan Press. Gaber, Marjorie. 2004. Compassion. In Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Laurent Berlant, 15–27. Routledge. Hron, Madelaine. 2020. Reel Refugees: Inside and Outside the Camp. In In Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities, ed. Emma Cox, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Agnes Woolley, 330–352. Edinburgh University Press. Moulin, Carolina. 2012. Ungrateful Subjects: Refugee Protests and the Logic of Gratitude. In Citizenship, Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement, edited by Peter Nyers and Kim Rygiel. Routledge. Nayeri, Dina. 2019. The Ungrateful Refugee. Canongate Books. Pedwell, Carolyn. 2014. Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy. Palgrave MacMillan.

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Said, Edward. 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Harvard University Press. Shire, Warshan. 2011. Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. Flipped Eye Publishing. Sigona, Nando. 2015. Campzenship: Reimagining the Camp as a Social and Political Space. Citizenship Studies 19 (1): 1–15. Slaughter, Joseph. 2007. Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. Fordham University Press. Stonebridge, Lyndsey. 2018. Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Family Journeys: Refugee Histories in Vietnamese American Graphic Memoirs Mike Classon Frangos

This chapter examines the graphic memoir as a form for refugee memory and the telling of refugee histories, with focus on two works by Vietnamese American comics artists: G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2010) and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir (2017). G.B.  Tran, born in the US, represents the “postmemory” generation whose have grown up with the traumatic memories of their parents. Thi Bui accompanied her parents to the US as a refugee at the age of three. In the works of both authors, family memories serve as the basis for the exploration of refugee history in the context of the Vietnam War and its aftermath in which memories of the past affect the present in the form of the aftereffects of traumatic events. These graphic memoirs use the comics medium to represent refugee experiences through family photographs and archival documents, as well as recursive and non-linear timelines that situate the work of memory in the present and open alternative futures for the “postmemory” generation.

M. Classon Frangos (*) Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Classon Frangos, S. Ghose (eds.), Refugee Genres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2_3

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The comics medium’s visual and verbal strategies are put to use in refugee graphic memoirs not only for the purpose of documentation and authentication but also to comment self-reflexively on the truth-claims of images and narratives. As comics scholars have argued, the use of hand-­ drawn images and eye-witness testimony to establish the authenticity of comics as a form of documentation contrasts with the purported indexicality of the photographic image.1 Through cartooning and illustration, comics use images and text to record personal and collective memories, not only by compiling evidence but also calling attention to the process of documentation. As Marianne Hirsch has argued in her influential work on “postmemory” (1992, 3) in Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1991), comics in particular can bear witness to traumatic histories through self-representations illustrating scenes of memorialization across generations, as well as by incorporating visual documentation, either as original photographs or hand-drawn copies. In their own graphic memoirs, G.B. Tran and Thi Bui create alternatives to dominant representations of refugeedom through works of life writing that use their own family histories as starting points for transnational practices of memory and postmemory across generational divides. In this way, Vietnamese American graphic memoirs can work against the dehistoricizing of refugees by using the comics form to represent refugee experiences against the backdrop of generational memories and histories.2 Both Tran and Bui represent refugeedom as cultural producers, which is to say as creators of their own graphic memoirs. Vietnamerica and The Best We Could Do are important examples of what Long Bui has called the “refugee repertoire” (2016, 112), cultural expressions and artifacts documenting refugee subjectivity in opposition to conventional narratives of refugees as victims. Instead, refugee subjectivity is produced in these works through active engagement with the past in the form of family memories and visual-verbal representations of refugee histories and experiences. In 1  On comics as a form for documentation and witnessing of atrocity, see, for example, recent work by Hillary Chute (2016), Nina Mickwitz (2016), Rebecca Scherr (2021) and Pramod Nayar (2021). 2  Lisa Malkki has influentially described refugees as “dehistoricized” (1996, 377) in their encounter with humanitarian organizations, NGOs and state actors. More recently, Gillian Whitlock (2015, 180-185) has argued that refugee life writing can function to rehistoricize and recontextualize refugee experiences. For readings of Tran and Bui’s graphic memoirs in terms of history, see for example Caroline Kyungah Hong (2014), Rocco Davis (2015), Catherine Nguyen (2018), and Stella Oh (2020).

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the context of Vietnam War cultural history and historiography, Vietnamese American graphic memoirs intervene in the historical representation of events narrated from a US perspective. From Apocalypse Now (1979) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) in film, to the novels of Tim O’Brien, cultural production would memorialize the war and its legacy for American and international publics. As numerous critics have noted, such narratives typically represent the war from a US-centric perspective, naturalizing the disastrous consequences of US military violence in Southeast Asia and glossing over the refugees produced in its wake.3 Indeed, as Yến Lê Espiritu argues, the production of refugees is inseparable from the transnational history of imperialist warfare since the mid-twentieth century, in which the same military infrastructure that produces “militarized refugees” (2014, 26), is also responsible for the humanitarian rescue of refugees. Both Tran and Bui’s graphic memoirs are created from the perspective of the Vietnamese American diaspora to offer an alternative, transnational history of the Vietnam War and its aftermath in the context of refugee experience. The graphic memoir, or “illustrated memoir,” as in the subtitle to Bui’s text, is a form of life-writing in which the self-representation of the author is materialized on the page through juxtapositions of words and images in sequential narration.4 While both Vietnamerica and The Best We Could Do have received some attention from scholars, existing readings have focused primarily on the representation of history rather than the form of the comics. As this chapter will demonstrate, Tran and Bui’s graphic memoirs put the comics medium to use in the documentation of personal and family histories and memories of post-1975 refugee migration to the US from Vietnam.

3  On Vietnam War narratives in particular, see Brenda M. Boyle (2016), as well as Yến Lê Espiritu (2014) and Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016) on cultural memory of the war from an Asian Americanist perspective. 4  Like the contested term “graphic novel,” “graphic memoir” may be seen as a marketing term that is not universally accepted among comics creators, though increasingly prevalent. In this chapter, I use “graphic memoir” instead of the more expansive term “comics autobiography” to distinguish memoir as a form of life writing from the classical autobiography. For more on the term “graphic memoir,” see Nancy Pedri (2013, 127). On comics autobiography more generally see Elisabeth El Refaie (2012) and Fredrik Byrn Køhlert (2019).

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Refugee Graphic Memoir Among the most famous works of graphic memoir establishing comics as a medium for autobiographical representation are two narratives of refugee experiences: Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1991) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2004). Both of these monumental works have received significant critical attention, but, somewhat surprisingly, their representations of refugeedom are less frequently noted.5 Spiegelman’s Maus bears witness to the memories and experiences of the author’s father, Vladek, before, during and after incarceration in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Maus documents not only Vladek’s many displacements within wartime Poland but also his experience as a postwar refugee in Sweden and the United States. So too, Satrapi’s Persepolis is based on the author’s witnessing of the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War and her own migrations to and from Europe. As a student in Vienna, the author, referred to in the text as Marji, is met with fascination from her fellow students who ask her if she has “known war” (2006, 168). Following the well-known examples of Maus and Persepolis, the genre of the graphic memoir has emerged as particularly suited to representations of trauma and flight. Hillary Chute (2016) has discussed how drawn images can bear witness to experiences of war, violence and disaster in the form of journalistic documentation by an observer who records perceptions and testimonies in the aftermath of an event. Documentary comics, whether autobiographical or journalistic, offer hand-drawn observations of the events and contexts they attempt to recount. A drawing in a documentary comic might include not just representations of people and figures, but also background details of landscape and architecture as a “forensic” record of war, atrocity or environmental destruction (Scherr 2021, 200). Crucially, drawings do not attempt to index the material world in the manner of a photographic image, but instead reveal the observer’s attempt to record by hand an experience or event to which he or she has been a direct or indirect witness. Discussing comics journalism on the topic of human rights abuses, Pramod Nayar uses the term 5  Scholarship on these central works is by this point too extensive to summarize, but, on Maus, in addition to Hirsch (1992), see for example Joseph Witek (1989), Hillary Chute (2006) and Candida Rifkind (2008), and on Persepolis see Gillian Whitlock (2006), Nina Mickwitz (2016) and Rebecca Scherr (2021), among many others. While memory, trauma, migration, human rights and witnessing are recurring themes in this scholarship, refugee representation is not typically mentioned as such.

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“amanuensistic witnessing” to describe the claims to authenticity of hand-­ drawn images in comics form: “Amanuensistic witnessing in the comic book and its ironic authentication, to phrase it differently, does not seek indexical referentiality but ensure that we readers see the drawings as mediated versions of what the artist-storyteller perceived in the faces, events and accounts s/he encountered” (2021, 130). In other words, through the use of drawn images, documentary comics bear witness to the process of witnessing, foregrounding the role of the comics creator in mediating the presentation of visual evidence and its truth-claims. In this way, the technique of drawing by hand foregrounds the “situated-ness” of documentary representation through the voice and subjectivity of the creator of the comic. For these reasons, as Nina Mickwitz has argued, comics that tell refugee stories are “well placed to counter the tendencies of news media and policy debates that render the individual experiences of refugees invisible” (2020, 278). To understand the work of memory undertaken by comics artists in the documentation and circulation of traumatic histories, Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” has been highly influential for comics scholars. In her reading of Spiegelman’s Maus, Hirsch calls attention to the way that the memories of Auschwitz contained in the text are not those of the author, Art, who is also the text’s first-person narrator, but rather, “mediated through his parents’ memories, his [Art’s] is what we may call a ‘post-­ memory’” (1992, 18). By postmemory, Hirsch means, “that of the child of the survivor whose life is dominated by memories of what preceded his/her birth” which is “distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection” (8). For Hirsch, Maus is a work of postmemory in which the author, Art, mediates the memories of his Holocaust-survivor parents, not only his father Vladek but also his mother Anja, whose absence after her suicide haunts the text. Inter-generational or collaborative autobiographies, such as Spiegelman’s Maus, show the reader the process by which the author records and recounts the narrative of events not directly experienced but whose effects have shaped his or her life (Hirsch 1992, 12; cf. Rifkind 2008, 401). For an author who may have been a child or not yet born during the traumatic events experienced by their parents or close relatives, the graphic memoir provides a medium for exploring and documenting experiences accessible only through the testimony or archives of others. In this sense, the individual and cultural memories expressed through the spatio-temporal form of the comics page provide alternatives to historical accounts from which

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marginalized perspectives have been excluded (i.e., the postmemory contained in graphic memoirs differs from the histories of textbooks; see Davis 2015). Graphic memoirs may thus open up representations of identity by working through complex histories and offering alternative identifications. In the history of cartooning and caricature, visual representation through comics has played a powerful role in both constructing and subverting identities through stereotyping, especially for minoritized groups.6 To subvert the history of racist and anti-Semitic caricaturing, Spiegelman famously draws the German and Jewish characters in Maus as cats and mice as a critique of the Nazi propaganda image of Jewish people as “vermin.” In Persepolis, Satrapi uses an overly simplified style of drawing to highlight the child’s perspective employed in the narrative, while subverting Orientalist representations of Islam and Iran. In an Asian American context, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006) uses stereotypical caricatures to show how minoritized identities are constructed through visual representations. As Frederik Byrn Køhlert has put it, “autobiographical comics offer a way of taking control of representation in a direct and politically loaded engagement with the visual self” (2019, 3). In other words, self-representation in the comics medium engages with the historical and political construction of identities in order to open up alternatives to stereotypical and minoritizing representations. In the representation of refugee experiences in particular, comics and graphic novels engage with the identities created and claimed through refugeedom. In her discussion of documentary comics of migrant detention centers, Candida Rifkind calls attention to graphic narratives that “go beyond empathetic identification with the other; that is, to shift the very borders between self and other, here and there, confinement and movement” (2020, 301). In this way, refugee comics can be modes of expression for refugee creators as both subjects and objects of representation, intervening in the terms of discourse through the visual-verbal form of the comics medium.

6  See for example, Jennifer Glaser (2018) on caricature in Maus, and Rebecca Wanzo (2020) on the use of caricature in American Born Chinese, alongside Køhlert’s discussion of minoritized self-representation in comics autobiography (2019).

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Post-Vietnam War Memories and Refugee Comics The Vietnam War is often seen as a watershed moment in the cultural history of war representations. Examining one of the most iconic visual documents of the Vietnam War, Susan Sontag writes, “There can be no suspicion about the authenticity of what is being shown in the picture taken by Eddie Adams in February 1968 of the chief of the South Vietnamese national police, Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, shooting a Vietcong suspect in a street in Saigon” (2004, 59). Yet, as Sontag goes on to remark, like many other famous war photographs, this image was “staged” (59) in the sense that the execution would not have been carried out on the street at all if not for the presence of journalists to record it. In this sense, photographic imagery’s purported status as documentary evidence during war is seen as increasingly uncertain. Not only photography, film and television, but also comics have provided a medium for visual responses to the war. As Chute has described (2016, 14; cf. Witek 1989, 40–45), war, horror and superhero comics have since World War II provided a popular cultural medium for working through the trauma of war when other forms of visual culture seemed inadequate. During and after the Vietnam War, superhero comics from The Amazing Spider Man to The X-Men and Daredevil, not to mention Marvel’s “realistic” war comic, The ‘Nam, served as popular responses to the war and its aftermath.7 As Cathy Schlund-Vials has described (2014, 189), Marvel comics depicting the Vietnam War reinforce conventional narratives about the war’s heroes and villains, at the same time as they provide visual representations of war experiences, including the arrival of South Vietnamese refugees. Anti-Vietnam War comix include volumes with titles such as, Vietnam: An Anti-War Tale (1967), Hydrogen Bomb and Biochemical Warfare Funnies (1970) and The Legion of Charlies (1971), among numerous other satirical strips in the underground press.8 Contemporary graphic novels including Will Eisner’s Last Day in Vietnam: A Memory (2000) and Jason Aaron and Cameron Stewart’s The Other Side (2006) also contribute to the ongoing history of representations of the Vietnam War and its cultural memory. 7  The creator of The ‘Nam cited in Kodosky 2011, 1049. On The ‘Nam in particular, see Richard Young (2015). There is an emerging body of scholarship on Vietnam War comics; see for example Robert Kodosky (2011) and Cathy Schlund-Vials (2014). 8  See the overview of this work by David Huxley (1990), and more recently by Alex Rallo (2014). More research is needed on the Vietnam War in underground comix.

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Regarding comics and other cultural practices that challenge dominant representations of post-Vietnam War refugee experience, Long Bui describes the “refugee repertoire” of popular culture and performance. Through the “refugee repertoire,” as Bui puts it, “the Vietnamese American postmemory generation adopts creative projects to absorb and articulate the Vietnam War’s aftershocks” (2016, 113). As Bui goes on to point out, the “performative repertoire” of Vietnamese American refugees includes also “the different marginalized art forms that have not constituted the literary canon” (122). According to Bui, the aesthetic and cultural forms of the refugee repertoire include not only comics, but also hip hop, street art, and slam poetry. In this context, Vietnamese American graphic memoirs, such as G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, exemplify the postmemory generation’s response to the aftermath of the Vietnam War in the form of comics. Similar to other Vietnam War memoirs, Tran and Bui’s works engage with official or textbook histories of the war and its cultural memory in US culture, but they also recast the terms of representations of post-Vietnam War refugees through their own personal and family histories. Crucially, Tran and Bui contribute to the refugee repertoire as cultural producers who resist the silencing and dehistoricizing of refugees by adopting the still  comparatively marginalized form of comics. Studying the cultural memory of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, as Asian Americanist scholarship has demonstrated, requires a transnational approach that pays attention to the diasporic and refugee contexts in which alternative histories and memories are produced and made meaningful. By contrast, Vietnam War historiography in the US has tended to focus on the backdrop of the Cold War, the anti-war movements, and the war’s effects on US domestic politics and international relations.9 Also known as the American War, the Vietnam War was the second war fought by Western powers over the decolonization of Vietnam after a period of French imperialism and Japanese occupation. Brenda M.  Boyle has described the tendency for US narratives of the Vietnam War in the postwar period, both literary and cinematic, to ignore French and Japanese colonial histories in order to portray the US defeat as a case of “friendly fire” (2016, 175; cf. Kinney 2000). In other words, US Vietnam War 9  A complete historiography of the Vietnam War is beyond the scope of this article, but for the Asian Americanist intervention, see most influentially Yến Lê Espiritu (2014) and Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016).

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narratives portray defeat in the Vietnam War as the inevitable result of the US’s own psychological and moral struggle with itself. As Boyle argues, such narratives naturalize war as an ahistorical condition and erase the disastrous consequences of the war on the people and environment of Southeast Asia (2016, 176). At the same time, post-Vietnam War refugees from Southeast Asia, including Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, Mien, ethnic Chinese, and other groups, have been seen as “boat people” in need of humanitarian rescue. In such post-Vietnam War histories, refugees are represented as victims rescued by white American saviors, a narrative of US humanitarian victory in the face of military defeat, what Espiritu calls the “we-win-even-when-we-lose syndrome” (2006b, 329). As a critique of narratives of the refugee as victim, Critical Refugee Studies have reassessed the figure of the refugee in light of Southeast Asian diasporic experiences.10 As Marguerite Nguyen and Catherine Fung argue (2016, 2), victim narratives in refugee representations not only displace responsibility for the production of refugees, but also obscure the specificities of refugee histories. Mimi Thi Nguyen has described how the Southeast Asian refugee is constructed as the subject of what she calls “the gift of freedom,” “[i]n the first instance as an object of intervention in the Cold War, and in the second as an object of deliverance in the aftermath of military defeat” (2012a, 23). The freedom “given” to the Southeast Asian refugee “rescued” from authoritarian persecution and military defeat can be seen as, according to Nguyen, a “liberalist alibi” that “revolutionizes imperial discourse and opens up histories of racial, colonial powers for regimes of subjection but also subjectivization, through which persons are actuated as free—to contract their labor, to educate their desire, for instance” (17). Humanitarian rescue narratives overlook the production of what Espiritu calls “militarized refugees,” the way in which the humanitarian rescue of refugees is accomplished using the same equipment and infrastructure used to conduct war in the conflict zone. So too, as Nguyen argues, the “gift” of freedom awarded to the refugee is one that can never be paid back, as vulnerability and dependency are seen as constitutive of refugeedom in the process of asylum and integration (30). Upon arrival, refugees are assimilated into racialized logics of neoliberal 10  See in particular Yến Lê Espiritu’s (2006a) call for Critical Refugee Studies, as well as Viet Thanh Nguyen (2012b) on refugee memories in Southeast Asian Studies. For further elaborations on Critical Refugee Studies in the post-Vietnam War context, see the essays collected in Nguyen and Fung 2016.

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capitalism and their citizenship is assessed according to the demands of economic productivity and the stigma of welfare dependency (see especially Ong 2003). The cultural practices of the Southeast Asian diaspora and its postmemory generation open up ways to move beyond narratives of “rescued” refugees delivered from war and persecution by generous Western saviors. In contrast with dominant representations of the Vietnam War, narrowly focused on experiences of US American soldiers, literary scholar and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls for “ethical memory,” or “memory work that recalls both one’s own as well as others’” (2013, 144). Thus, memory work surrounding the Vietnam War and its aftermath is necessarily transnational, produced through scholarly and cultural practices in and between Southeast Asian diasporas and their homelands. As Nguyen puts it elsewhere, “The study of Southeast Asians in the United States is therefore an effort to recall a history of war that most US citizens remember imperfectly, if at all, and to claim countries, with all the symbolic, real, and dead weight they carry” (2012b, 914). In this way, Critical Refugee Studies address the need to counter the dehistoricization of refugees by situating Southeast Asian refugee experiences within the transnational context of the Vietnam War and the militarized production of refugees in its aftermath.

Refugee History and Postmemory in G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica A graphic memoir of his family’s experience before, during and after the Vietnam War, G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey is a document of refugee history and memory. Similar to Spiegelman’s Maus, in which the memories of the author’s father Vladek are recorded and illustrated visually in the text, the voice of the narrative of Vietnamerica is to a large extent carried by the author’s mother Dzung. In Vietnamerica, different levels of the narrative merge into each other through lushly illustrated full-­ page spreads and frequently invisible panel borders. In chapters that take place across multiple, intersecting timelines, past and present merge into each other, as Dzung’s narration is juxtaposed with GB’s repeated returns to Vietnam. As Caroline Kyungah Hong puts it, “Vietnamerica’s circular, nonchronological, repetitive structure enacts memory’s fluid patterns and the irregular, always unfinished processes of accessing the past, uncovering histories, and constructing genealogies” (2014, 14–15).

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Rather than a linear timeline of historical events, narrative continuity in Vietnamerica is instead maintained through visual and verbal elements that repeat throughout the comic. As Tran has described in an interview, the style and form of Vietnamerica is meant “to simulate how disorienting it was for me to unravel my family’s history in the first place” (qtd. in Hong 2014, 15). In fact, much of Vietnamerica narrates GB’s own “disinterest” in the experiences and memories of his family in Vietnam and their journey to the US As GB puts it in Vietnamerica, “My family’s unwillingness to share the most basic facts was as much to blame as my decades of disinterest and insensitivity” (2010, 98). In Vietnamerica, the risk of the erasure of history is portrayed as an effect of refugee experience in which families are scattered, and records of the past are deliberately forgotten or left behind. When the family gathers for the death of his grandmother in a “sterile hospital” in New York, GB reflects on the “sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, customs and shared history lost in a single generation” (113). Over the course of Vietnamerica, GB recounts his own increasing awareness of his family’s journey in an attempt to counter the loss of history from the perspective of the postmemory generation. In place of a linear timeline of events, the historical context for GB’s family history emerges through accounts of the family’s conflicting allegiances on both sides of the conflict, between Japanese- and French-­ colonial forces and the Vietminh, and between the communist North and the French- and American-backed South. As Dzung, GB’s mother, puts it in the text, “Individuals pick sides. Families don’t” (2010, 35). In this way, Vietnamerica offers a counter-history of narratives of the Vietnam War in which only US experiences are foregrounded and ongoing histories of colonial occupation are erased. The Vietnam War is not depicted as an example of the US’s struggle with itself, but instead from a transnational, diasporic perspective, foregrounding the significant population displacements caused by the war, including within Vietnam itself. Anti-communist persecution and communist reeducation camps are depicted as examples of the trauma of war and its aftermath, both of which were experienced directly by members of GB’s family and family friends. Dzung tells GB during the course of her narrative, “I tell you these things but you’ll never understand. We left Vietnam so you would NEVER have to know what it’s like” (152). Although the experience of historical and cultural trauma may be inaccessible for GB, Vietnamerica uses the comics form to represent the trauma of war and flight in the family’s individual and collective memories.

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Through the comics form, traumatic experience is presented even as it is narrated indirectly from the perspective of GB’s family members. Black spaces in the gutters between panels, black backgrounds, black panels and entire black pages are used to suggest traumatic experiences in between the gaps of the narration. Representations of trauma in Vietnamerica take the form of repeated visual elements that connect the different timelines and scenes of narration in the text. At two key moments, Tran uses pages composed in the self-reflexive form of mise en abyme to depict traumatic experiences: first his father Tri’s interrogation for information regarding his own father’s involvement in the Vietminh, and Tri’s friend Do’s experience in a communist labor camp after the war. In both cases, mise en abyme is used to represent the repetitive experience of the time of incarceration through a series of mirror-image reflections repeated to the point of illegibility.11 The first time the form of the mise en abyme occurs in Vietnamerica, the comic shows GB’s father, Tri, having been taken in for interrogation during the war between the French and the Vietminh. An interrogator asks in the first panel, “Anything new to tell us this week, Tri?” followed by “No? All right then. Maybe next week” (2010, 79). The sequence of interrogation and silence is repeated in the panels that fill the bottom right corner of the page in a mise en abyme in which the last panel of the page contains a miniature version of the page as a whole. The page uses a black gutter and is mostly devoid of color with the exception of the red of the interrogator’s lighter and the light outside the cell window. In a stark contrast, the facing page shows Tri earlier in his life in Saigon earning extra income as an actor in a French film about the conflict, with leftand right-angle brackets representing dialogue in another language: “ and “” (79). Another mise en abyme page further illustrates the limits of representations of trauma in Tran’s comic. Having noted that Do was typically silent about his own experiences in a communist reeducation camp, the text on the page describes the camp’s “exercise,” “amenities,” “downtime,” “privacy” and “food for everyone” (149), ironically juxtaposed with images of deprivation repeated in mise en abyme (Fig. 3.1).

11  Compare Michael Cheney on mise en abyme as a “topos” (2011, 22) for self-portrait in graphic novel autobiographies. According to Cheney, the self-reflexivity of the mise en abyme is characteristic of how graphic novelists “perform identity visually” (2011, 23).

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Fig. 3.1  G.B. Tran, Vietnamerica © G.B. Tran © Villard

The family’s refugee experience is present throughout the text, beginning from the first page, in which Dzung asks GB, “You know what your father was doing at your age? He… WE left Vietnam” (2010, 1). Later, GB refers to his family’s dispersal throughout the US, his half-siblings having left for the “allure of American freedoms” (110). At another point in the text, the refugee history of the Vietnamese diaspora is visually foregrounded in a full-page representation of Vietnam on a map of Southeast Asia, depicted as a chasm filled with refugees grasping for the surface and a group of naval vessels just out of reach (159). Countering familiar images of “boat people,” Tran’s illustration of Vietnam as a country of refugees serves as a visual reminder of the effects of US military intervention and a contrast with the narrative of humanitarian rescue. The Tran family’s dramatic flight from Vietnam is recounted only near the end of the text through the intervention of their white American friend Leonard who insists on the entire family boarding a flight out of Saigon together: “EVERYING SINGLE FUCKING ONE” (265). Another recurring visual element is the boxes packed and unpacked by GB and his parents, about which GB points to relatively few objects his mother has saved from Vietnam, noting that “the rest of this old junk is all Dad’s” (2010, 157). Dzung replies, “Isn’t it obvious? Your father knew we were leaving. I didn’t” (157–158). Throughout Vietnamerica, the risk of the loss of history is symbolized by the boxes into which GB and his family’s memories are consigned and stored away. The packing of boxes connects GB with his parents when an austere textbook called The Vietnam War given by his father as a graduation present is tossed by GB into a box

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for storage. As Catherine Nguyen argues in her reading of Vietnamerica, the official history represented by the textbook does not provide any authoritative knowledge of Vietnam for GB (2018, 206). But the textbook history of the Vietnam War serves as a “glimmer of hope” that “someday I’d want to learn,” as GB explains (2010, 207). The discovery of the textbook later motivates GB’s own decision to follow his family to Vietnam to begin a journey of discovery of his own. Significantly, at the moment in the text when GB’s history textbook is packed into the box, the panels of the comic itself also begin to disappear into the box, illustrating the author’s postmemory condition and the limits of his own visual representations of his family’s experiences.

Feminist Refugee Autobiography in Thi Bui’s the Best we Could Do Like G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir is a graphic memoir about refugee experience and the postmemory generation through the frame of family history. But the first chapter of The Best We Could Do opens quite differently from Vietnamerica. It features a full-page spread in first-person perspective of the figure of a woman in labor, in this case, a self-representation of the author, with the text “I’m in labor” centered on the page. Throughout Bui’s graphic memoir, giving birth is represented as an embodied experience connecting generations across history. As the author states at the end of the chapter, “family is now something I have created and not just something I was born into” (2017, 21). Both Vietnamerica and The Best We Could Do include full-page spreads of the country of Vietnam, but here as well there are important differences between the texts. While Tran’s full-page image of Vietnam emphasizes the geopolitical situation and the situation of refugees, Bui draws two images of the shape of the country, one in the background of the page and another in mirror image on the back of the author. As Stella Oh puts it, “The mirror image of Viêt Nam brings focus to different sites and sights of recollection and legitimacy and writes a feminist version of the Vietnam War previously memorialized through a predominantly hypermasculine lens” (2020, 10). Like Tran’s Vietnamerica, Bui’s memoir writes back to dominant narratives of the Vietnam War, but this time through a feminist perspective with a focus on memories and experiences left out in typically masculine narratives of the war and its aftermath.

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In this way, The Best We Could Do is also a work of feminist life writing in which representations of gender and embodiment are foregrounded.12 In contrast to Tran’s Vietnamerica, a clear first-person narration in The Best We Could Do allows the reader to follow Bui’s retracing of her family history. The first pages of the text open with an historical timeline of events from the start of the First Indochina War in 1946 to the Fall of Saigon in 1975. Here, Bui’s text presents the linear narrative of official history, one reaching back to the period of French colonialism and centuries of Chinese suzerainty, to orient the reader through the graphic memoir’s personal and family history. This historical timeline is significant in that it contextualizes the Vietnam War in the earlier struggles against French and Japanese colonization, and not just a US military intervention. As Chute points out in her reading of the explanatory timelines in Spiegelman’s Maus, the desire to order the events of history into a linear timeline emerges from the potential of the comics form to give spatial form to time (2006, 210–212). Through the sequence of images on the page, the comics artist gives spatial form to histories that may be overlapping, recurring and unfinished. Indeed, Bui’s visual timeline of the conflicts in Vietnam is important for framing the perspective of history in the memoir, using Vietnamese spellings and referring to the fall of South Vietnam as “Liberation Day,” in other words, a history of Vietnam not solely composed from an American perspective. Yet, Bui’s opening timeline also contains significant gaps in terms of the memoir as a whole: the experiences of the Bui family and the multiple pregnancies that punctuate the chapters are conspicuously omitted. Significantly, the timeline ends with “Liberation Day” in 1975, leaving the story of refugee migration and the Vietnamese diaspora to be narrated in the remainder of the memoir. In other words, the initial closure offered by the linear timeline of history at the beginning of Bui’s text is only temporary and provisional to what follows in the text. After the first chapter’s depiction of the author’s own experience giving birth, the second chapter of The Best We Could Do recalls her mother’s pregnancies in reverse order: from a refugee camp in Malaysia in 1976, through four earlier births in and around Saigon, including a harrowing delivery on a Mekong Delta road barricaded by the Vietcong. At the end 12  Hillary Chute (2010, 19) has emphasized how representations of embodiment are crucial to feminist life writing in comics and graphic novels. As Oh demonstrates (2020), The Best We Could Do is similarly situated in this genealogy of autobiographical feminist comics.

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of the chapter, Bui narrates the birth of her parents’ first child, a daughter named Quyên who died after one month, and imagines how their lives must have been shaped by this early loss. The phrase “the best we could do” (2017, 55) occurs in the text as the words of the hospital staff who could not save the baby. “The best we could do” is implicitly contrasted with the “high hopes” and “possibility” (58) placed on the next generation who did not share in their parents’ loss but nevertheless grow up with its consequences. “And though my parents took us far away from the site of their grief,” the author continues, “certain shadows stretched far, casting a gray stillness over our childhood” (59). Having been taken “far away from the site of their grief” by her parents, the author’s refugee experience is not depicted as the involuntary effects of war or persecution, but instead an expression of a deeper condition of loss and mourning shaping the subjectivities of both parents and children. It is this expression of loss and its consequences that introduces the stories of the author’s father and mother in the memoir. Like Tran, Bui writes from the perspective of the postmemory generation, deeply affected by experiences of trauma without having direct access to those experiences. Drawing on the experiences of her family in illustrating her memoir, Bui documents her own process of composition in dialogue with her parents. At the end of a chapter in which she has drawn her father’s flight as a seven-year-old boy from the conflict between the French and the Vietminh, including hiding alone for days in an underground dugout, the author shows herself at her drawing desk with her elderly father at her side looking at her drawings. “Mm.,” he says, “You know how it was for me. And why later I wouldn’t be… normal” (130). Attempting to represent the experiences of her mother, Bui remarks how “she felt uncomfortable talking to her family about her former life” (2017, 136). Bui draws herself next to her mother in a position reminiscent of Art’s tape-recorded interviews in Maus documenting his father’s testimony. By contrast, verbal documentation appears insufficient for Bui to bear witness to her mother’s history in Vietnam. Instead, Bui includes drawn versions of visual evidence, alongside her own earlier drawings of her mother: documents of her own process of documenting her family’s memories. As Oh puts it, “Through the use of images, photographs, maps, and text, Bui explores the desire to identify the missing memories of those affected by immigration, exile, and war in Việt Nam” (2020, 8–9). The “missing memories” that Bui explores through the use of visual documentation in The Best We Could Do include not only those of her family but also the refugee community at large.

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Bui includes in the text a hand-drawn version of the famous photograph by Eddie Addams, “Saigon Execution,” underscoring the context for the image not usually foregrounded in narratives of the Vietnam War: “no one talks about how that same Việt Cộng, just hours before, had murdered an entire family in their home!” (2017, 206). Bui complicates conventional understandings of “the good guys” and “the bad guys” in the war, with “the Vietnamese people” portrayed through stereotypical images of “bar girls and hookers,” “corrupt leaders” and “small effete men” (207). Bui offers a counter-narrative of the photograph “Saigon Execution” by contextualizing the image within South Vietnamese refugee history, as she later discovers that the “former general” in the photograph had become a refugee in the US, and, “like my parents and so many immigrants, was in a state fallen from grace” (208). For Bui, the lesson of the “Saigon Execution” photograph is that “a lot of Americans forget that for the Vietnamese… the war continued, whether America was involved or not” (209). Though the fall of Saigon is remembered as “Liberation Day” in Vietnam, Bui continues in the next chapter by pointing out that “among expats like my parents, it is remembered as THE DAY WE LOST OUR COUNTRY” (211). Another perilous flight is depicted in the text in the form of the family’s boat journey over several nights, facing the risk of pirates and patrol boats, before arriving in Malaysia as asylum seekers. After their arrival and processing in a refugee camp, Bui declares in a full-page spread that also includes her family’s refugee photographs: “we were now BOAT PEOPLE” (2017, 267). The retrospective effect of Bui’s formulation emphasizes how the label “boat people” becomes an identity as a result the bureaucratic process of asylum seeking—the family are identified as “boat people” only after surviving the journey by boat. On the same page, Bui emphasizes that her family were only “five among hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding into neighboring countries, seeking asylum” (267). Bui’s photographs of her family are juxtaposed with drawings of photographs of other, anonymous asylum-seekers. As Pramod Nayar points out, at this moment in The Best We Could Do, “close-up shots of the individual refugees humanize them” (2021, 115). By including drawn copies of refugee photographs, Bui calls attention to the visual technologies that shape refugee identity from the moment of their arrival at the camp. Through her own hand-drawn documentation of her family’s experiences, Bui is able to recontextualize the visual documents by which her family’s refugee identities have been constructed and memorialized.

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Throughout Bui’s memoir, refugee subjectivity emerges in the gap between the hopes of those who have fled and the expectations placed on them by the society into which they have arrived. “Don’t be such a REFUGEE!” (2017, 285), Thi is commanded by an older cousin who has come to the US some years earlier. When the Bui family resolves to leave Indiana, where they have come to join their relatives, for California, they are told, “YOU’RE UNGRATEFUL!” (291), by their own family members. In The Best We Could Do, the refugee’s uneasy experience in the host country contrasts with the expectation of a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid. By representing the refusal of the refugee’s obligation to be grateful and instead bearing witness to refugee memories, Bui’s memoir connects the postmemory generation to the past while opening alternatives for the expression of refugee subjectivities in the future. Bui’s graphic memoir concludes with a return to her own experience of motherhood and her own attempt to understand refugeedom as an inheritance for herself and her family. When her own new-born baby stays in the hospital incubator for the treatment of jaundice, she thinks of her own parents’ first child who did not survive. When her baby is about to be released from the hospital, she speaks to him in Vietnamese and refers to herself using the North Vietnamese word for mother, “Mẹ,” the word that was used by her own mother instead of the South Vietnamese “Má,” and which Bui herself preferred. Hearing herself speak to her child using her mother’s voice, Bui reflects, “To accidentally call myself Mẹ was to slip myself into her shoes just for a moment” (2017, 318). But rather than experiencing a moment of identification with her mother’s refugeedom, Bui finds a different view of her mother than the one to which she has been attached: “To let her be not what I want her to be but someone independent, self-determining and free, means letting go of that picture of her in my head” (319). In the same way, Bui reflects that when she looks at her son she does not see “war and loss” (328), but rather “a new life” that she thinks “maybe” can be “free” (329). At the end of The Best We Could Do, an opening to the future emerges as the inheritance of refugeedom. For Bui, refugee memory suggests an opening to a liberatory future in opposition to normative expectations of refugee victimhood and passivity.

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Conclusion Contributing to the anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (2018) edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Vietnamese American comics artist Thi Bui contributed a single-page comic titled “Perspective.” The comic consists of two illustrations, one with the title “Traveling Light, 2017,” and the other, “Refugees, 1978.” In the first image, a woman stands with a roller-suitcase and shoulder bag filled with clothes, personal items, gifts, passport, credit card, cash and several electronic devices. In the second image, a refugee family stands beside a duffle bag filled with clothes, identification cards, and a bag of lime and sugar. Readers of Bui’s graphic memoir The Best We Could Do will recognize the woman of the first image as Bui herself, and the refugee family of the second image as the Bui family, including the author’s mother, who was pregnant at the time. The comic is a diptych in which both illustrations form a whole—the woman traveling alone in the first is the little girl of the refugee family in the second. In the dialogue between past and present, Bui’s diptych is a reminder of the lingering presence of refugee histories and memories, a refusal to disavow the experience of refugeedom and its inheritance. Both G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do are graphic memoirs that exemplify the perspective of the postgeneration on refugee histories, while gesturing to potential futures of refugeedom in opposition to dominant representations. In Vietnamerica, refugee history responds to and complicates the official history of the Vietnam War, concretized in the form of the textbook given to GB by his father. Instead, Tran’s graphic memoir offers non-linear storytelling, using the spatial form of the comics page to illustrate alternative histories of the trauma of war and its aftermath. For Bui in The Best We Could Do, refugee memories are linked to the family’s history through the embodied experience of pregnancy and giving birth. Bui’s graphic memoir calls attention to not only the status of embodied experience, but also visual evidence in the form of photographic documentation. Both Tran and Bui’s graphic memoirs use the comics form to situate their own post/memories of refugeedom in family narratives, compiled through non-linear narratives that do not conform to normative expectations of refugeedom. In this way, Tran and Bui’s graphic memoirs work against the dehistoricization of refugeedom, using the visual and verbal strategies of the comics medium to assemble and mobilize personal and collective memories in the documentation of refugee histories and hope for alternative futures.

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References Boyle, Brenda M. 2016. Naturalizing War: The Stories We Tell about the Vietnam War. In Looking Back on the Vietnam War, ed. Brenda M. Boyle and Jeehyun Lim, 175–192. Rutgers University Press. Bui, Long. 2016. The Refugee Repertoire: Performing and Staging the Postmemories of Violence. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 41 (3): 112–132. Bui, Thi. 2017. The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir. Abrams Comicarts. ———. 2018. Perspective. In The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, ed. Viet Thanh Nguyen, 61. Abrams Press. Cheney, Michael A. 2011. Terrors of the Mirror and the ‘Mise en Abyme’ of Graphic Novel Autobiography. College Literature 38 (3): 21–44. Chute, Hillary L. 2006. ‘The Shadow of a past Time’: History and Graphic Representation in ‘Maus’. Twentieth Century Literature 52 (2): 199–230. ———. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia University Press. ———. 2016. Disaster Drawn. Harvard University Press. Davis, R.G. 2015. Layering History: Graphic Embodiment and Emotions in GB Tran's Vietnamerica. Rethinking History 19 (2): 252–267. Espiritu, Yến Lê. 2006a. Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US Scholarship. Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1 (1-2): 410–433. ———. 2006b. “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: US Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon.’” American Quarterly 58 (2): 329-352. ———. 2014. Body counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees. University of California Press. Glaser, Jennifer. 2018. Art Spiegelman and the Caricature Archive. In Redrawing the Historical Past: History, Memory, and Multiethnic Graphic Novels, ed. Martha J.  Cutter and Cathy J.  Schlund-Vials, 294–320. University of Georgia Press. Hirsch, Marianne. 1992. Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-memory. Discourse 15 (2): 3–29. Hong, Caroline Kyungah. 2014. Disorienting the Vietnam War: GB Tran’s Vietnamerica as Transnational and Transhistorical Graphic Memoir. Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies 5: 11–22. Huxley, David. 1990. Naked Aggression: American Comic Books and the Vietnam War. Comics Journal: The Magazine of News and Criticism 136 (July): 105–112. Kinney, Katherine. 2000. Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War. Oxford University Press.

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Kodosky, Robert J. 2011. Holy Tet Westy!: Graphic Novels and the Vietnam War. The Journal of Popular Culture 55 (5): 1047–1066. Køhlert, Frederik Byrn. 2019. Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics. Rutgers University Press. Malkki, Liisa H. 1996. Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization. Cultural Anthropology 11 (3): 377–404. Mickwitz, Nina. 2016. Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-telling in a Skeptical Age. Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2020. Comics Telling Refugee Stories. In Documenting Trauma in Comics, ed. Dominic Davis and Candida Rifkind, 277–296. Palgrave Macmillan. Nayar, Pramod K. 2021. The Human Rights Graphic Novel: Drawing it Just Right. Routledge. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. 2012a. The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt and Other Refugee Passages. Duke University Press. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. 2012b. Refugee Memories and Asian American Critique. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 20 (3): 911–942. ———. 2013. Just Memory: War and the Ethics of Remembrance. American Literary History 25 (1): 144–163. ———. 2016. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Harvard University Press. Nguyen, Catherine H. 2018. Illustrating Diaspora: History and Memory in Vietnamese American and French Graphic Novels. In Redrawing the Historical Past: History, Memory, and Multiethnic Graphic Novels, ed. Martha J. Cutter and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, 182–216. University of Georgia Press. Nguyen, Marguerite, and Catherine Fung. 2016. Editor’s Introduction: Refugee Cultures: Forty Years after the Vietnam War. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 41 (3): 1–7. Oh, Stella. 2020. Birthing a Graphic Archive of Memory: Re-Viewing the Refugee Experience in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 45 (4): 72–90. Ong, Aihwa. 2003. Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America. University of California Press. Pedri, Nancy. 2013. Graphic Memoir: Neither Fact nor Fiction. In From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, ed. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, 127–154. De Gruyter. Rallo, Alex. 2014. The Anti-War Panels: Underground Comix and Vietnam. PopMatters. June 25. [https://www.popmatters.com/182792-­the-­anti-­war-­ panels-­underground-­comix-­and-­vietnam-­2495649370.html] Refaie, El. 2012. Elisabeth. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures: University Press of Mississippi.

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Rifkind, Candida. 2008. Drawn From Memory: Comics Artists and Intergenerational Auto/biography. Canadian Review of American Studies 38 (3): 399–427. ———. 2020. Migrant Detention Comics and the Aesthetic Technologies of Compassion. In Documenting Trauma in Comics, ed. Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, 297–316. Palgrave Macmillan. Satrapi, Marjane. 2006. Persepolis. Vintage. Scherr, Rebecca. 2021. Regarding the Ruins: Ruins and Humanitarian Witnessing in Satrapi and Sacco. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 12 (3): 193–206. Schlund-Vials, Cathy. 2014. In "(Re)Collecting Vietnam: Vietnamization, Soldier Remorse, and Marvel Comics." Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives, ed. Monica Chiu, 189–208. Hong Kong University Press. Sontag, Susan. 2004. Regarding the Pain of Pthers. London. Tran, G.B. 2010. Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey. Villard. Wanzo, Rebecca. 2020. Identity Temporalities and American Born Chinese. Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society 4 (1): 82–100. Whitlock, Gillian. 2006. Autographics: The Seeing "I" of the Comics. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52 (4): 965–979. ———. 2015. Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford University Press. Witek, Joseph. 1989. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. University of Mississippi Press. Young, Richard. 2015. There is Nothing Grittier Than a ‘Grunt’s Eye View’: American Comics Books and the Popular Memory of the Vietnam War. Australasian Journal of American Studies 34 (2): 75–93.

CHAPTER 4

Insular Metaphors: Representations of Cyprus in Mediterranean Refugee Literatures after the 1980s Daniele Nunziata

A considerable number of displaced Arab writers have represented the island of Cyprus in their works. The setting of Cyprus is occasionally depicted by Arab writers as a safe harbour amid the chaos of an unstable Mediterranean Sea. These writers take the transcontinental metaphors afforded by the insular space and use it to express an identity which, like the island, is set adrift on the waves between continents, searching for (literary and physical) freedom, autonomy, and safety. Cyprus, for modern refugee writers, becomes a metonym for their homelessness and their ontological interstitiality, drawing on the real experiences of Arab exiles on its shores. This chapter will focus on two exilic authors from the Arab world: the Sudanese novelist and short story writer, Tayeb Salih, and the Palestinian architect and life-writer, Suad Amiry. Cypriot, Sudanese, and Palestinian people have much in common in terms of history, culture, and politics.

D. Nunziata (*) English Literature, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Classon Frangos, S. Ghose (eds.), Refugee Genres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2_4

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The Crown Colony of Cyprus, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and Mandatory Palestine were all part of the post-Ottoman British Empire. The former two colonies gained independence in the years leading to 1960, while the latter was dissolved in 1948. Violence since these dates has led to the political division of Cyprus, Sudan and Jerusalem and to the displacement of thousands of Cypriot and Arab refugees, either internally or abroad. Sudanese refugees comprise one of the largest communities of displaced peoples living in Cyprus. While the exact figures of Sudanese refugees on the island are difficult to verify, in the years following the First Sudanese Civil War, the UN observed that “Cyprus fully supported the work of the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees, for which it had only praise,” especially in their “efforts to facilitate the repatriation of Sudanese refugees,” which had been “of decisive importance” (2017, 281). Similarly, many Palestinians have fled to Cyprus, including several notable political figures, writers, and artists, such as Fida and Sabri Jiryis, Hanna Nakkarah, and Habib Qahwaji. Palestinian cultural services have frequently been revitalised in Nicosia, including the Palestine Research Centre. Albanese and Takkenberg note that, in Cyprus from 2009 onwards, “the number of registered Palestinian refugees and asylum seekers has ranged between 1,500 and 2,000 per year” (2020, 291). Meanwhile, a quarter of Cypriots, approximately 25,000 people, became refugees during the 1974 division of the island, though most remained either internally displaced or travelled to the Global North (especially the UK). The primary case studies for this chapter—Amiry’s “Privatising Allenby” and the poems collected in Golda Slept Here, and Salih’s “The Cypriot Man”—are examples of first-person writing which depict the lives of Arab refugees and displaced peoples in relation to a shared Cypriot setting. Drawing on the experiences of Sudanese refugees and migrants in Cyprus, Salih’s short story embraces the brevity of the genre to explore the possibilities and challenges of forced movement between continents, using the island as a metaphor for both a liminal cultural identity and a fear of death in the perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea. First published in English in 1981 as part of Sixteen Sudanese Short Stories (translated by Constance E.  Berkley), it was subsequently republished in Arabic Short Stories (1994), translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. The latter translation will be cited across this chapter. Comparatively, the fragmentary style of some of Amiry’s short prose and poetry offers a similar focus on the disjointed, fleeting, and sometimes broken experiences of the lives of people who have become refugees. Several scholars have observed the important

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ways in which many Arab refugee writers compose literary works which straddle—and even resist—established borders of prose and poetic genres (Furani 2012, 113, 175; Fakhreddine 2021). Within these forms of refugee short stories and life writing, Cyprus becomes a metaphor through which the authors unpack the fragmentary nature of displacement across the blockades, bridges, and boats of the Eastern Mediterranean. “The Cypriot Man” and “Privatising Allenby” offer two of the few prose works by modern Arab writers which describe the island in detail. There are important parallels these two representations of the island which need to be investigated. In both author’s works, the motifs of insularity and connection are personal. Salih’s writing expresses existential meditations based on his lived experiences of exile across continents. In Amiry’s writing, the focus on the personal impact of colonialism—directly comparing her life with that of a Cypriot friend—showcases how Cyprus enables her to understand global oppression through an intimate and local(ised) reference point. It is through life writing that Amiry shows how she and her friends from across the decolonising world face the struggles of colonialism in their daily lives, from crossing Allenby to trading stories with peers in neighbouring Cyprus. For Edward Said, “exile [becomes] an experience of crossing boundaries and charting new territories in defiance of the classic canonical enclosures, however much its loss and sadness should be acknowledged” (2014, 384). By “crossing boundaries” in terms of genre, Salih moves away from the novel and composes the short story “The Cypriot Man” to conceptualise the instability of displacement across the turbulent Mediterranean Sea. Amiry also provides first-hand accounts of Cyprus and its inhabitants in works which consider the connections between Palestinian and Cypriot histories, using the island as a bridge towards interpersonal and political solidarity with other postcolonial contexts. While Salih uses Cyprus as a metaphor of insularity, Amiry uses it as a bridge towards solidarity with Cypriot peers. In this sense, the island functions as a double metaphor of both insularity and connection, illustrating the varying moments of isolation and connection Arab writers experience in relation to the rest of the region and the world. Questions of citizenship and nationhood run through the heart of both authors’ works. Of particular interest to this chapter is the ways in which they each grapple with, and even subvert, ideas of the nation(al) by comparing the Arab context with another context on the outside: that of neighbouring Cyprus. It is necessary, following Anna Bernard, to examine how

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“texts in international circulation intervene in the conflict over different definitions of citizenship, and how they theorize, predict, and defend … contrasting models of national belonging” (2013, 39). The metaphoric possibilities of Cyprus enable Arab writers to consider Arab-ness through a non-nationalist, non-Arab, and allocentric reference point, but one which remains part of a regional(ist) model that is both Middle Eastern and postcolonial. In many respects, the connection between these contexts can add to Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh’s investigation into “South-­ South cooperation” and migration “as an anti-colonial paradigm associated with the non-aligned movement” (2015, 4). While many refugees are forced to move to the Global North, mass Sudanese and Palestinian exile to Cyprus marks an attempt to remain within the so-called postcolonial world under the influence of the Non-Aligned Movement of which the Republic of Cyprus and the Democratic Republic of the Sudan were founding members. Many politicians from these communities have often referred to one other in terms of solidarity, including Yasser Arafat who, in his 1974 UN General Assembly speech, declared that “consideration of the question of Cyprus belongs within that of Middle Eastern problems as well as of Mediterranean problems” (Arafat 1974). This complicated relationship, therefore, manifests in literary works which grapple with the ways in which Arab refugees connect with other former colonies of the British Empire, but with specific added attention to the transhistorical Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean. Attention is placed on Sudanese, Palestinian, and Cypriot peoples as neighbouring communities with longstanding ties, not only because of proximity, but due to shared histories of colonialism and sectarianism. In a region of political division, the sense of similarity allows new metaphors of identity to emerge.

Tayeb Salih: Cyprus and Insularity Setting plays a powerful role throughout Salih’s “The Cypriot Man.” The short story follows an unnamed first-person narrator who was born in Sudan and is temporarily stranded in Cyprus, waiting to fly to Beirut to be reunited with his daughters and their mother (1994, 78). In Cyprus, at a communal swimming pool, he meets the eponymous character, a repulsive man whose identity is unknown, except that his voice is a combination of Western European and North American accents. Later, the narrator has a conversation with his friend, Taher Wad Rawwasi, who is either present on

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the island or a figment of the narrator’s imagination. At the story’s conclusion, the narrator meets a Palestinian woman refugee just before learning of his father’s death in Sudan. As the so-called “Cypriot man” reappears in the final paragraphs and promises the eventual demise of the narrator, the mysterious figure blurs the boundaries of the real and imagined. At times, he seems to appear as a personification of Death in the narrator’s grief-­ stricken mind. Cyprus, therefore, becomes the site in which the narrator physically moves between continents—alongside the movements of other Arab refugees and migrants—while simultaneously acting as a metaphor for the deaths—past and future—incurred in the precarious travels between Sudan, Egypt, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and beyond. The story forges direct connections between the geography of the Eastern Mediterranean to showcase the metaphorical role played by Cyprus as an insular port which both welcomes refugees and is the site of many of their deaths at sea and on land. Cyprus is simultaneously home to displaced peoples from across the Middle East and harbours a representation of Death who callously watches innocent people die while speaking the languages of the colonising agents of Europe and America. Cyprus is introduced in the opening lines of the short story which emphasise the liminality of the island’s capital city as an insular setting partway between Africa and Asia and between the colonialist categories of Orient and Occident: Nicosia in July was as though Khartoum had been transplanted to Damascus. The streets, as laid out by the British, were broad, the desert was that of Khartoum, but there was that struggle between the east and west winds that I remembered in Damascus. It was British from head to toe, despite all that blood that had been spilt. I was surprised for I had expected a town of Greek character. The man, though, did not give me time to pursue my thought to its conclusion [as he sat] beside me at the edge of the swimming-pool. (1994, 75)

The island setting acts as a metaphor of an insular identity which is physically and figuratively “between the east and west.” Cyprus represents a harbour between Africa and Asia which facilitates the narrator’s own movements from Sudan to Beirut. It offers a point of safety for many displaced people making the dangerous journey across various parts of the Eastern Mediterranean looking for temporary shelter and an opportunity to reunite with separated family members. However, the brief allusion to

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“blood [being] spilt” inserts a sombre tone which foreshadows the preoccupation with death later in the story, indicating the difficulties in surviving the route between Mediterranean countries. Reflecting its physical geography, the landscape and atmosphere of Cyprus is presented as being half-way between Sudan and Syria; it gestures to two continental parts of the Arab world simultaneously. The term “transplanted” echoes the movement of refugees whose lives are uprooted from one location to another, while providing botanical connotations that suggest images of hybridity. Not only is Cyprus a metaphor of cultural hybridity between continents, but it also represents the relocation of displaced peoples in the liminal spaces between fixed locations. The metaphorical way in which “Khartoum had been transplanted” is similar to how Sudanese refugees have “been transplanted” to Cyprus, Lebanon, and Syria. The liminality of Cyprus is represented elsewhere in the temporal setting of July (the middle point of the calendar year); the description of a “thought” rendered incomplete part-way through its formation; and the characters’ meeting point on the very “edge of” a body of water. The importance of Cyprus as a liminal location seeps into all aspects of the narrative: the narrator is placed on the limens between land and water, stationed on an island between two continents in the very middle of the year. Cyprus reflects the in-betweenness of the narrator’s own identity in exile and demonstrates his sense of belonging to neither one state nor another— neither “east [nor] west”—as he awaits further travel to an unpredictable future. Cyprus is a confusing setting for the narrator, with its mix of Sudanese, Syrian, and British qualities, and rendered even more unstable by his incorrect expectation that it would have a “Greek character.” In parallel, the narrator—whose name, occupation, and physical appearance are all unknown to the reader—has an identity which is confusing, in transit, and never able to reach a tangible “conclusion.” In some ways, Cyprus and the narrator stand in for each other, as neither has a stable sense of belonging in the world. While there is confusion as to which continent or cultural sphere Cyprus belongs, the narrator does not know what will become of his dislocated family when he continues his exilic movements. The island, therefore, metaphorises the in-betweenness and instability of the lives of Arab refugees who are forced to move between states and continents. Cyprus is chosen as an example of the ways in which the geography of the entire Middle East has been “laid out by the British” Empire. The impact of imperial cartography is still felt in on the roads of the three capitals once colonised by the British and French—Damascus, Khartoum,

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and Nicosia—and is directly connected to “all that blood that had been spilt” during colonial-era violence and displacement. The personification of Nicosia as “British from head to toe” illustrates how the body politic of British imperialism inspired the bloodshed of Cypriots as the island wrestled for independence. In other words, the body of British imperial rule which occupied Cyprus, and its neighbours, is shown to be responsible for the deaths of the bodies of colonised and displaced people across the Mediterranean who continue to search for political and personal freedom. By choosing to focus the text on Nicosia (rather than any of the island’s other cities), the story evokes the violent history of its division into two halves, which created thousands of internally displaced Cypriot refugees. Postcolonial Nicosia is not just a metaphor of refugee travel routes between continents, it is a metaphor for the colonial violence which resulted in, and directly caused, displacement here and in other cities across the Middle East. Variations of the phrase, “the edge of the swimming pool” (1994, 80–81), recur a further two times in the short story. In one example, the narrator describes how he and the so-called “Cypriot man” would sit on the sides and watch “light play around the surface of the water. Between the light and the darkness” (80). The Manichean language emphasises his position between opposing states of being as he waits to continue his journey onwards and looks for a sense of certainty. The doubleness also draws attention to both the positive and negative connotations of a life of movement, including the narrator’s ambivalent relationship with water. As the short story progresses, water (and especially that which surrounds the island of Cyprus) is increasingly associated with death. Several paragraphs after this description of the swimming pool, the narrator recalls the death of one of Taher’s relations, Maryam. Maryam’s family spent time “floundering about in the waves in pursuit of Maryam’s phantom,” calling out and “linking the two banks with silken threads” of their grieving laments (81). While Taher’s relative is only mentioned in passing, the account associates water with the death of innocent life, reminding readers of the dangers of exilic travel out of the Nile and into the Mediterranean. With a name common among members of the three largest Abrahamic faiths, Maryam is characterised as an everywoman who represents the deaths of millions of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish refugees across the “banks” of the Mediterranean and whose “phantom[s]” continue to haunt the sea. Echoing the names of Moses’ sister and Jesus’ mother, this Maryam stands in for the countless families who have lost relatives due to displacement across the waves.

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Similarly, when the narrator learns of the death of his father, he notes that he had “crossed seas and deserts” (1994, 82) in his attempt to find out the cause of death and to be reunited with his body. Once again, travel across sea and land is associated with the destruction of a family unit and the death of a loved one. His inability to prevent his father’s death illustrates the ultimate sense of powerlessness that the narrator feels as he travels alone on the perilous journey between the opposites of “seas and deserts.” Sentences before this, a third death is very briefly mentioned: the narrator encounters a Palestinian refugee in Beirut who simply says, “I’m Palestinian—my daughter has died” (82). It is during this very moment that the narrator also receives the telegram informing him of his father’s passing. In very short succession, the story describes three deaths and illustrates their impact on family members: Taher, the narrator, and the unnamed Palestinian mother. Placed together, the three examples illustrate the connections in grief experienced across the Middle East and Arab world as refugees, migrants, and colonised peoples face death on a regular basis, often associated with “the waves” (81) and “sea” (82) on the journey between continents. As Parvarti Nair explains in her analysis of how refugees are depicted in mainstream media, “[w]ater, as waves, surges, floods and currents, is a long-standing metaphor for life’s greater fluidities, often viewed in contrast to land, which is stable, sure and mapped,” with the Mediterranean offering the strongest example of this mode of representation (2019, 414). Water represents both a figurative form of existential instability for refugees, as well as a reminder of the deaths that occur at sea. The correlation between travel, water, and death is extended in the narrator’s description of viewing Cyprus from an airplane window: At nine o’clock in the morning the plane taking me to Beirut circled above Nicosia; it looked to me like an ancient cemetery. (1994, 82)

In explicit terms, the insular setting of Cyprus is used as a metaphor for the deaths occurring within and across the Mediterranean. Not only is the island liminal in terms of being between continents (or between light and dark, east and west), it is space between life and death. As a metaphorical “cemetery,” the island allows the narrator to consider all lives lost in the transit between Africa, Asia, and Europe—including Cypriot, Sudanese, and Palestinian refugees. The contrast between the newness associated with “the morning” and the oldness denoted by “ancient” illustrates the

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in-betweenness of the island, while also alluding to the indiscriminate nature of death: both the young and old have died in the Mediterranean and this history of mourning is as “ancient” as the sea itself. It is on the journey across the sea—taking an airplane from one capital city to another—that the narrator gains a new perspective on the Mediterranean, using Cyprus to contemplate and memorialise the lives which have been lost between its shores. Indeed, the narrator repeats this scene after he learns of his father’s death, noting that “when the aeroplane was bearing me from Nicosia to Beirut they had just finished burying him” (83). The journey between states is placed in parallel with the father’s journey from life to death, and the liminal nature of the island is used to illustrate the transition which occurs at the end of life. The narrator notes that his father “had been waiting my arrival impatiently, for I had written to him that I was coming” (83). Not only did the narrator miss the funeral as he was in transit, but the regret of not reuniting before death demonstrates the grief and homesickness of a life lived in exile and diaspora. The act of travel forces the narrator away from his father—and his fatherland—and adds to the sense of unresolvable loss which he compares with the island as an “ancient cemetery.” In addition to experiencing the physical loss of his father, the narrator feels he is losing his connection with his family and his relationship with the homeland he is compelled to leave. Cyprus, and the sea around it, become metaphors of the sacrifices made by refugees and migrants, from a stable sense of selfhood to one’s own life. Cyprus, therefore, functions as a purgatory on the border of life and death. It is in this metaphorical purgatory that the narrator meets the so-­ called “Cypriot man.” At the end of the short story, the narrator imagines the “Cypriot man” at his father’s grave, and the ominous and mysterious figure warns the narrator that his own death is unavoidable and will follow imminently (1994, 83). As Waïl S.  Hassan convincingly observes, “the characterization of the titular character [is that of] a nightmare figure who is an amalgam of several literary and allegorical characters,” including Mephistopheles and Death (2003, 169). Salih chooses the “cemetery”like setting of Cyprus to facilitate the discussion between the narrator and his own imagining of personified Death. Cyprus opens the doorway between states of existence, and reminds the narrator of the inevitability of death—especially between the war-torn shores of the postcolonial Mediterranean. Little is known about the eponymous character, except that he speaks with various European and American accents: “Sometimes his voice was English, sometimes it had a German accent; at others it

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seemed French to me; he used American words” (1994, 81). Framing the character alongside these accents demonstrates that he is not a local Cypriot, but a Euro-American expatriate associated with the superpowers of the mid-twentieth century. Connecting this figure with these linguistic forms implies that the deaths which haunt the narrative—the deaths of Middle Eastern refugees and colonised peoples—is a consequence of European and American geopolitical action in the region. The face of Death assumes a British-German-French-American face because, for the narrator, the colonisation of the Middle East is the defining historical factor responsible for warfare and displacement in postcolonial Cyprus, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, and beyond. Earlier, the narrator even alludes to the Balfour Declaration and wishes that “Balfour … had promised” Cyprus as part of his proclamation (77). The island is entrenched in the history of the Middle East—including that of Palestinians and Israelis—and its in-­ between location means that it witnesses the mass displacements and deaths happening in the waters beside it. Sentences later, the narrator apprehensively observes that a “wave of laughter broadened out and enfolded me” (77). Presumably coming from the “Cypriot man,” the laughter—expressed with the character’s mix of European and American accents—is compared with overpowering “wave[s].” It therefore represents how the voice of imperialism lingers over the “wave[s]” of the Mediterranean and traps the narrator in a political history into which he is “enfolded” and cannot escape. This attention to the power—and powerlessness—of language recurs throughout the text. As has been noted earlier, the narrator repeatedly makes reference to the failure or incompleteness of his words. In the opening paragraphs, he notes that he was not afforded “time to pursue my thought to its conclusion” (1994, 75) when describing his observations of Cyprus. Later, he regrets that the promise he “had written to” his father to visit him was unfulfilled (83). The sense that the narrator has only limited control over his words, and not enough “time” to compose them fully or successfully, gestures metatextually to the genre of the work: the short story. Indeed, the short story genre itself exemplifies the metaphors of insularity that depict the insular nature of both Cyprus and of the stateless and stranded refugees who pass through and alongside the island. This is clearest when we compare the short story genre with that of the novel. “The Cypriot Man” makes reference to Salih’s earlier work, Season of Migration to the North, through a brief allusion to that novel’s protagonist, Mustafa Sa’eed and its setting, Wad Hamid (see also, Hassan 2003,

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170). Therefore, the text takes place within the same fictional world as the preceding novel, but it is not a direct sequel and does not belong to the same literary genre. “The Cypriot Man” is simultaneously connected to, and isolated from, Salih’s established oeuvre—in much the same way that Cyprus is aligned to, but geographically separated from, the mainland which surrounds it. This represents the liminality of the short story as a genre in Salih’s oeuvre, which is not quite the same as a novel (despite being written in prose) and which exists as one insular narrative within an anthologised collection of other, similarly-isolated stories. In general, short stories are themselves islands which provide narratorial access to experiences and moments marooned from the context beyond their limits. Meanwhile, occasional moments of intertextuality remind readers of the fleeting points of connection between narratives. As Sam Naidu observes in an analysis of Stuart Hall’s theories of hybrid identities, “[s]hort fiction, with its own propensity for variety, movement and recombination, provides a crucial vector for [the] experience” of postcolonial displacement and diaspora formation (2018, 324). Indeed, the brevity of “The Cypriot Man” means than some of its ideas are raised without being fully realised or explained, including the definitive identity of the eponymous character, or the future of the narrator and his family in Beirut or beyond. The postcolonial short story genre reflects the transitory nature of a life in exile which starts to recreate or rewrite an identity, yet its future is unknown and a continuation remains unguaranteed. Indeed, “The Cypriot Man” employs metatextual strategies to form connections between the brevity of its own genre and the instability of writing about displacement. The narrator’s friend, Taher, describes himself as someone who has lived a life of exile and faced labour exploitation: From when I first became aware of the world … I’ve been on the move. I don’t remember ever not moving. I work like a horse … (1994, 78)

The narrator then considers the possibility of asking him “about the story of his marriage” and how “he used to make fun both of himself and of the world” (78). The narrator wonders whether Taher would “become a hero” (78) in such a story, but ultimately fails to ask him about his past. Nonetheless, Taher anticipates the narrator’s desire to know more about him and simply “utter[s] a short phrase compounded of the fabric of his whole life”: the names of his family members (79). Within this scene, the “life” of an individual is analogised with the “fabric” of textuality and

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story-telling. However, the exploited migrant worker, Taher, struggles to translate himself to become the autonomous “hero” of the types of narratives published and circulated in the West. His story remains unheard, except for “a short phrase” to his friend, which itself echoes the brevity of the “short” story genre. The Western novel form is closed to the lives of people like Taher; and even the narrator of “The Cypriot Man” remains nameless and without physical description in a text without a conventional hero figure. Through this meta-commentary, Salih questions who can be conferred with the status of “hero,” drawing attention to how Muslim, Arab, and Middle-Eastern displaced peoples—people who are constantly “on the move” (78)—are often denied subjecthood in the literary industries of Europe and the US. The stories of millions of refugees and colonised peoples are left unspoken and unread within the Eurocentric global marketplace of world literature. Salih draws attention to, while trying to resist, what Amanda Rogers describes as “the violence of marginalisation against … refugees and migrants” across literary traditions (2014, 113). By making “fun both of himself and of the world,” Taher and his tragic life of labour exploitation and bereavement represents the wider tragedy of the contemporary “world” as a site of unequal movement, abuse, and death, of which his life is just one passing example. This echoes the Cypriot setting as an island of colonial and postcolonial conflict floating on the surface of “the world” and acting as a metaphor for every life which remains in purgatory: both geographically (between states and continents) and textually (outside, or on the margins of, literary representation). Cypriot, Sudanese, and Palestinian refugees are routinely denied subjectivity as a consequence of the colonial violence taking place both in the Middle East and within literary industries. While Salih gestures to the lives of displaced Arabs—from Taher and Maryam, to the unnamed Palestinian mother—their histories, much like their lives, are cut short by a genre which represents the struggle of refugees through metaphorical depictions of a Mediterranean island between “east and west.” However, this is only achieved by the use of brief, interrupted, and sometimes inconclusive vignettes, representing both the instability of lives in exile and the limitations of a prose genre defined by its concision and transience. In particular, the setting of a narrative about the displacement of Arabs (from different continents) on an island proximal to the Arab world (but in which Arabic is not a principle, official language), illustrates how the writing of both Arab selfhood and statehood is being deferred and pushed to the margins. In the short story

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genre, the complexities of Arab cultural and national identities are inevitably rendered incomplete. Nonetheless, by playing with the expectations of genre—eschewing the traditional realism of prose for overt and nuanced metaphoricity—Salih represents the experiences of displaced peoples in new ways. His text offers an account of Eastern Mediterranean geography which provides its displaced Arab narrator with agency over the acts of literary and cartographic representation. While his fate is unknown, the narrator continues his journey, using Cyprus—the island and the metaphor—as a means to contemplate an identity on the move from one part of the Arab world to another. Yet its metaphorical links with insular liminality also associates Cyprus with the deaths of the Mediterranean, both those of individual refugees and that of a stable sense of selfhood and statehood which has been denied by acts of colonialism. The liminality of the short story genre is reflected in the metaphorical liminality of its chosen setting—Cyprus—and the liminality of lives forced between the continents which surround it.

Suad Amiry: Cyprus as a Bridge A similar image of Cyprus recurs throughout the prose literary forms used by Amiry. Across her literary career, Amiry has mostly composed memoirs and testimonial short stories which use the first-person pronoun and draw on her lived experiences. There is a constant blurring of author and narrator, and Amiry (as an architect) is concerned with how identities and nations are constructed culturally and geographically. Although Amiry never lived in Cyprus, the island is part of her geographical framework and she uses it sporadically as a metaphor in some of her writing. One such example is in a short piece of prose entitled “Privatising Allenby,” anthologised in This Is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature. It is a work of life writing which might also be described as an essay or “reportage” (as the subtitle suggests), destabilising the differences between these “Western” genres. In Amiry’s story, the first-person author-narrator commences by quoting an SMS message she receives from a friend, informing her of the costs incurred by travelling across the Allenby Bridge (or, Al-Karameh Bridge) which connects Jericho to the Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, Jordan. According to the information the author-narrator has received, the price of “the new VIP service” of $600 “is equivalent to a one-week excursion to Cyprus! This makes the crossing of the Allenby Bridge by far

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the most expensive border crossing on this planet. For one of the poorest of its populations” (2017, 69). Here, Cyprus is deployed as a reference point. Given its history, it is used to measure distances within a politically-­ divided Eastern Mediterranean area. For a refugee like Amiry, it becomes easy to directly compare the nautical exile to Cyprus (and its costs) with the land-based deportations from Palestine to Jordan. Indeed, the comparison is a localised way of gauging the nature of the displacement being represented and one which would be understood by Palestinian readers. Like for Salih, this association with maritime travel emphasises the painful insularity of Arab communities. Given the connotations of bridges—which can traverse either seas or deserts, to paraphrase Salih—the parallel with Cyprus stresses the ways in which the West Bank also functions as a divided island space. In this instance, Palestinians face the economic pressures and indignity of paying high amounts to access an airport; the metaphor of transportation is used to emphasise the severe limitations imposed on free movement. There is some irony at work here in suggesting that it is easier for Palestinians to sail to Cyprus than it is for them to access a free, internationally-­recognised airport. This all sits in contrast with the modes of communication being used inside and outside the text: the SMS between two Palestinian friends and the literary work allowing a Palestinian writer to speak to international readers (as well as Anglophone Palestinian readers). Both these modes can travel in ways in which Palestinian bodies are often denied on the land or in the air. Likewise, the genre of “Privatising Allenby”—prose life writing which has the objectivity of an essay but the intimacy and imagination of a short story—is freed from the reductive constraints of genre as dictated by “Western” literary markets. Its impactful brevity, and its inclusion in an anthology tied to the Palestine Festival of Literature, allows Amiry’s testimony to be read accessibly and globally (and to be celebrated in the physical space of the annual festival). Elsewhere in Amiry’s writing, Cyprus is used in alternative ways to represent parallels between the experiences of Palestinians and those of other postcolonial contexts, either specifically in the Levant or Middle East or more generally across the globe. In her poem “The Never-Ending Chapter” (from the 2014 mixed prose/poetry collection, Golda Slept Here), Amiry’s speaker details the devastation inflicted on “the hundreds of bulldozed villages” once inhabited by now-dispossessed Palestinians. With pathos, she considers the cost of this destruction which cannot be measured by material possessions or even abandoned animals. The ineffability of war cannot be described by “A left-behind Arab horse or a Cypriot

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donkey/ Nor a Persian cat nor even Shasa, the monkey that my mother gave me a few days before the war” (2014, 190). First, it is worth connecting this account with the monetary lexis of “Privatising Allenby” to reiterate the economic suffering inflicted on refugees who, as well as losing lives and memories, are forced into severe poverty, which impedes their future survival and personal development. Moreover, in these two lines—the first dramatically shorter than the second, representing the unevenness of refugee lives—the illustrations of war’s remnants emphasises the dehumanisation faced by Palestinians and other postcolonial refugees. The national and/or ethnic identifiers of all three animals—Cypriot, Arab, and Persian— tacitly compares the experiences of dispossessed peoples across the Middle East. The implication is that the fate faced by Palestinians is shared by neighbouring peoples. In a movement away from images of insularity, Cyprus is used here to remind readers of the connections between these related contexts. The focus on connections between related Eastern Mediterranean spaces and communities relates to Boehmer’s important theory of the “networks of resistance” and other “bilateral relations between Third World or tri-continental countries” which have been “made possible and shaped by worldwide colonial ([and] what we would today term neo-­ colonial) nexuses of communication and exchange” (2005, 12). Interestingly, in Amiry’s narrative, however, it is the specific experiences of Palestinians which constitute an island here: the ethnonym remains unspoken and unrecognised, reflecting the ways in which Palestinians share many cultural, historical, and political parallels with other Levantine peoples, but their suffering often remains unremarked, ignored, and even taboo. Perhaps the monkey represents Palestinians in the way the ubiquitous Cyprus donkey represents the island, especially as the monkey is an inheritance from the speaker’s “mother.” Yet its Palestinian-ness is denied, like that of many actual Palestinian people. The monkey’s name, possibly from the Arabic for shaggy, expresses the indeterminateness of Palestinian (refugee) identities which are relegated to loose, rather than firm, existential significations. This poem offers an important expression of commonality across the Eastern Mediterranean and Iran, while also emphasising the uniqueness of Palestinian displacement given the limited recognition of the often-unuttered word “Palestine.” The sense of postcolonial, transnational solidarity appears in the opening piece of the same collection (Golda Slept Here), a prose narrative entitled “They Missed Mama’s Cooking.” The narrator compares and

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contrasts her sense of self as a Palestinian with that of “Ranjani, Mama’s domestic helper, who was far from home and whose house” in Sri Lanka “was swept away by the 2004 tsunami” (2014, 22). The narrator admires Ranjani’s determination and her ability to “carr[y] on” (22). The homeless of this character is used to speak about the parallels with the homelessness and statelessness of many Palestinians, while also commenting on the economic and social differences between a Sri Lankan migrant worker and a displaced Palestinian who can afford to hire a migrant worker who lives in their new home. There is recognition of the layered connections and differences between refugee experiences as they occur across the world, from the victims of war to those of natural disasters. This paragraph is immediately succeeded by a series of connections to other people the narrator compares with herself, her mother, and Ranjani. This begins with a Cypriot character: I think of Vanouch, my Armenian-Greek-Cypriot friend, (married to a Palestinian) whose home ended up on the other side of Nicosia, and who burst into tears when the young wife of the Turkish officer told her that the chimney in that house was a new addition. ‘It was my father who built this chimney with his own hands.’ (22)

The narrative then immediately continues with further parallels beings made with an Indian friend, Ritu, “who lost a home in what became Pakistan,” and Shams, a Pakistani friend, who lost “her home in Delhi” (22). She then thinks of Sami, a Jewish Iraqi friend who misses Baghdad after being forced to flee to London, before mourning the interconnected discrimination faced by the displaced “Jewish communities who not long ago were an integral part of the former Arab world,” as well as other marginalised communities: Native Americans, African Americans, and Indigenous Australians. She concludes that, “Like most of us, [they are] never to feel at home again” (23). The lexical parallels between these short paragraphs—especially the repetition of homes and houses—emphasises the intersections between these lived experiences of sectarianism, segregation and ethnic cleansing. In most cases, the narrator focuses on areas of the world once part of the British Empire (including the postcolonial modern capitals of Nicosia, New Delhi, and Baghdad) to showcase the long-term impact of imperialism across every inhabited continent. The narrator shows links between the systemic and colonialist violence inflicted on Palestinians, Cypriots, South Asian peoples, and Jewish peoples. In

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most of the cases, the details recounted are not simply political, but showcase the personal impact of these instances of oppression. The narrator focuses on individual cases by characterising these nebulous political events through the experiences of her own international friends. This indicates a sense of interpersonal connectivity leading towards anti-colonial resistance, demonstrating the need for dialogue and collaboration between dispossessed peoples. This short paragraph is the only one dedicated to Cyprus—or rather, to one Cypriot. It uses disjointed syntax, moving between various voices and perspectives which are spliced together with short sentences and parentheses. The long sentence quoted above begins with the author-narrator as the subject (“I think”) before introducing Vanouch and then mentioning her friend’s “Palestinian” spouse in brackets. The story then moves to southern Nicosia and then to “the other side” of the city, before recalling the third-hand words of the “wife of the Turkish officer.” Without any full stops, the sentence moves between five different people (including two spouses), and two halves of the divided Cypriot capital. It confusingly recalls words (the claim “that the chimney … was a new addition”) which had been received in a long chain of communication across geographies and languages (beginning possibly in Turkish). Even the comma before the first bracket seems irregular. The overall effect is to metonymically illustrate the chaos of the arbitrary divisions breaking the island apart, like the rambling fragments of this very account of Nicosia. As an architect, Amiry focuses on the construction of the “new” supplementary “chimney” to illustrate the ever-changing nature of human societies in which the idea of home (or, one’s “house”) is built, and how competing claims are then made over these spaces. While Vanouch tells Amiry that her father “built the chimney,” a competing claim is made by the Turkish officer’s “wife.” Amiry centres the voices of Middle Eastern women—including women who speak Arabic, Armenian, Greek and Turkish—to reveal the movements of communication in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, the description of the marriage between a Cypriot and a Palestinian (and the fact that it is positioned first in the list of ant-colonial testimonies which then follow from this paragraph) heightens the links between Cypriots and Palestinians in particular as neighbouring people living in post-Ottoman, post-British spaces of the Levant. The description reveals the complexity of the so-called “Cyprus problem,” beyond binary simplification. For instance, there is allusion to the relationship Cyprus has with Greece and Turkey, as well as reference to the presence of the

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often-­forgotten Armenian-speaking community on the island. This community is not unlike those of Armenian-speaking Palestinians who are also forgotten in some discussions of the demographics of the region; these related communities have experienced multiple forms of displacement throughout their history, including that incurred because of the Armenian Genocide of the early twentieth century. This is nuanced and informed representation of the Eastern Mediterranean. Notably, rather than figuring Cyprus as a metonym of isolation, Amiry uses it to manifest points of postcolonial connectivity and solidarity—beginning with the history of Cypriots as one of the closest parallels with that of neighbouring Palestinians. Cyprus is less an island in this context, but a bridge.1 It is the first in a chain of connections spanning out to the rest of the decolonising world. In literature, Cyprus is often represented through a “transportal” perspective which stresses its role in generating points of contact between established traditions from mainland Asia and Europe (Nunziata 2020, 24–27). In this case, the bridge-like function of Cyprus— rendered as an imagined, but successful, counterpoint to Allenby Bridge— allows the Palestinian author-narrator to express cultural and political comparisons with the rest the postcolonial world and to, therefore, counteract the ways in which international support for Palestinian refugees is frequently marginalised and suppressed. This is a call for global, yet personalised, connections between anti-colonial causes to overcome the very insularity which writers like Amiry and Salih experienced and described in their texts.

Conclusions As has been illustrated, Cyprus offers an important point of reference for Arab refugee writers based on its proximity to the Middle Eastern mainland; its similar postcolonial history and geography; and its actual utility as a safe space to which many Sudanese and Palestinian refugees have fled for sanctuary over the past century. There are many similarities and 1  The Cypriot politician, Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis, has explained how the island’s “special relationship with the EU and very friendly ties we maintain with both Israel and the Arab countries in the area are a very important factor in using Cyprus as a bridge between Europe and the Middle East” (Séphocle 2000, 44). Similarly, Andreas Theophanous describes “Cyprus as a Bridge … between the EU and the Middle East” (2004, 127). In archaeology, A.  Bernard Knapp and Vassos Karageorghis examine Cypriot history to explore the longrunning and “unique importance of Cyprus as a bridge between East and West” (Knapp 2013, 28).

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differences in how the island is used metaphorically by Arab authors. Salih uses the possibilities offered by the island as a liminal space to explore the nuances of an identity in exile. However, his short story also uses images of insularity to warn of the ways in which Arab refugees—both Sudanese and Palestinian—are often stranded (politically and culturally) and risk death in their movements across continents. Amiry takes these motifs forward to demonstrate, in her hybrid life writing and poetry, how the situation in Cyprus enables her to make points of contact with other postcolonial situations and to bring the experiences of Palestinian displacement into dialogue with other comparable contexts, both in the immediate Levant and more widely across the world. By contrast with Salih’s focus on the insular, Amiry gestures towards forms of bridging between modes of political oppression beginning with the metaphor of Cyprus. In both cases, short stories and life writing are literary genres that provide agency for Arab exilic writers in ways denied by the dehumanising register of official “Western” histories of the region. Cyprus is an extremely important ideological setting for Arab writers and thinkers, allowing for metaphors for both insularity and bridging which remain authentic to the conditions of a postcolonial Middle East within which Cypriot, Sudanese, and Palestinian people (among other neighbouring communities) have long experienced exile and dispossession.

References Albanese, Francesca, and Lex Takkenberg. 2020. Palestinian Refugees in International Law. Oxford University Press. Amiry, Suad. 2014. Golda Slept Here. Bloomsbury. ———. 2017. Privatising Allenby. In This Is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature, ed. Ahdaf Soueif and Omar Robert Hamilton, 69–72. Bloomsbury. Arafat, Yasser. 1974. 1974 UN General Assembly Speech. November 13. https:// en.wikisource.org/wiki/Yasser_Arafat%27s_1974_UN_General_Assembly_ speech. Accessed 5 Jan 2021. Bernard, Anna. 2013. Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/ Palestine. Liverpool University Press. Boehmer, Elleke. 2005. Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fakhreddine, Huda J. 2021. The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice. Edinburgh University Press.

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Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Elena. 2015. South-South Educational Migration, Humanitarianism and Development: Views from the Caribbean, North Africa and the Middle East. Routledge. Furani, Khaled. 2012. Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry. Stanford University Press. Hassan, Waïl S. 2003. Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction. Syracuse University Press. Knapp, Bernard A. 2013. The Archaeology of Cyprus: From Earliest Prehistory Through the Bronze Age. Cambridge University Press. Naidu, Sam. 2018. Diaspora and the Short Story. In The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English, ed. Paul Delaney, 313–327. Edinburgh University Press. Nair, Parvarti. 2019. At Sea: Hope as Survival and Sustenance for Refugees. In Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities, ed. Emma Cox, 410–422. Edinburgh University Press. Nunziata, Daniele. 2020. Colonial and Postcolonial Cyprus: Transportal Literatures of Empire, Nationalism, and Sectarianism. Palgrave Macmillan. Rogers, Amanda. 2014. Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity, and the Geographies of Performance. Routledge. Said, Edward. 2014. Culture and Imperialism. Random House. Salih, Tayeb. 1994. The Cypriot Man. In Arabic Short Stories. Ed. and Trans. Denys Johnson-Davies. University of California Press. Séphocle, Marilyn. 2000. Then, They Were Twelve: The Women of Washington’s Embassy Row. Greenwood. Theophanous, Andreas. 2004. The Cyprus Question and the EU: The Challenge and the Promise. Intercollege Press. United Nations General Assembly. 2017. Official Records: Twenty-Seventh Session—Third Committee. United Nations.

PART II

Performance and Documentary Media

CHAPTER 5

Home Is Goose Bumps (on a Second Skin): Refugee Experience in the Songs of the Zollhausboys Christine Farhan

In the summer of 2019, I had the opportunity to interview Azad Kour and Ismaeel Foustok, who both write songs and perform as singers, musicians and dancers in the band Zollhausboys. The Zollhausboys is the result of an integration project initiated by the German artist Pago Balke in 2015. Balke went to a camp for unaccompanied minors [unbegleitete minderjährige Flüchtlinge] in Bremen called Zollhaus [customs house] and asked for interested youths for his music project about refugee experiences. A mixed group of Syrian and German musicians was founded, creating song and dance performances dealing with the experience of forced migration. The group quickly became quite famous in Germany and has been touring with great success all over the country.

C. Farhan (*) Comparative Literature, Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Classon Frangos, S. Ghose (eds.), Refugee Genres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2_5

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I had planned the interviews with Azad and Ismaeel in the context of my ongoing research project,1 which focuses on ways in which refugees deal with the precarities of migration when resettling in a new environment. The project is situated in a line of research challenging deficit and victim-discourses (Curry et  al. 2018), that portray refugees “as victims lacking agency and control” (Ryu and Tuvilla 2018, 542). Instead, our project emphasizes “the multidimensionality of the refugee experience” (Bui 2016, 114). Our focus is on agency and strategies of empowerment that occur in autobiographical refugee stories gathered through interviews. Niklas Luhmann’s concept of trust is of special significance here. He claims that “a complete absence of trust” would prevent us “even from getting up in the morning” and calls it “a basic fact of social life” (Luhmann 2004, 4). Following his lead, we understand narratives as “recipes for structuring experience itself, for laying down routes into memory, for not only guiding the life narrative up to the present but directing it into the future … a life as led is inseparable from a life as told” (Bruner 2004, 708). Interviews are a special form of storytelling because they occur in a special situation of social interaction. In constructing and structuring who they are, the interviewees do important identity work at the very moment of the interview, that is, their stories are not stable and coherent but “constructed dialogically and dynamically and improvised in the moment of interaction” (Ryu and Tuvilla 2018, 542). By telling stories and answering the interviewer’s questions, the interviewee creates meaning and identity. In this respect the interview can be seen as an act of learning, opening up for understanding life experience in new ways, leading to “autoepistemic effects”: “Autobiographic storytelling thus does not simply express a preexisting identity. The act of telling can cause autoepistemic effects by the communicative setup of the research setting” (Deppermann 2015, 377). The interview is a performative situation where interviewer and interviewee interact. Though the purpose is “to gain access to the narrative identity of a person,” there are also “performative aspects of identity having to do with self-presentation and interactional negotiation” (377). When I met Azad and Ismaeel for the interviews I learned about their interest in music and writing songs about their experience as refugees as well as performing in the group. This raised my awareness of songs as an aesthetic means for storytelling. The combination of different aesthetic 1  “The (dis-)connected refugee” together with professor Heike Graf funded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies.

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expressions allows for more emotional intimacy and a wider range of possibilities to convey the complexity of an experience. The combination of music and words might help to express the sensuous dimensions of the embodied experience and to convey refugees not “as helpless beings frozen in stasis, disabled bodies rather than capable and inspired subjects with tales to tell about themselves and what their creative minds and flexible bodies can do” (Bui 2016, 114). In this chapter, I reflect on songs, especially their lyrics, in two ways: Firstly, I analyze the lyrics of four songs from the Zollhausboys’ first show. I want to know what concepts of home they convey, referring to Sara Ahmed’s metaphorical notion of home as a second skin. In the second part I turn to an interview situation with Ismaeel. In this interview it becomes obvious how songs are used as a complement to speech and an aesthetic expression for storytelling, and thus an important element in the identity work that is done during the interview.

Home Is Goose Bumps (on a Second Skin) “Homes are effects of the histories of arrival” (Ahmed 2006, 9), states Sara Ahmed. The crucial question here is what the effects of these histories are when arrivals are the result of forced migration, when one has to leave the familiarity of a home in order to establish a new one in an unfamiliar environment. Then the notion of home becomes even more complex and complicated: how do refugees arrive and how do they establish a new home? Ahmed approaches the concept of home from a phenomenological perspective, connecting it to the experience of orientation and disorientation in a(n) (un)familiar space. According to her, orientation is not just about “how we ‘find our way’ but how we come to ‘feel at home’” (Ahmed 2006, 7). She understands orientation as always connected to the body and “the bodily inhabitance of … space” (Ahmed 2006, 6), “stretching myself out,” embodying spaces by “expanding one’s body” (11). In this process “skin sensations” (90) play an important role. According to Ahmed, the skin expands and contracts when exposed to the new environment. “The body provides us with perspective,” where the skin is understood both as a borderline and an arena for interplay: on the one hand the skin contains the body, and on the other hand it is the skin “where the atmosphere creates an impression; just think of goose bumps, textures on the skin surface, as body traces of the coldness of the air” (9).

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Part One: Home and Being at Home When One Leaves Home When it comes to migration, especially forced migration, the crucial issue is often disorientation, the failing of orientation, in relation to the question of how to make “the strange familiar through the extension of bodies into space” (Ahmed 2006, 11). Ahmed describes migration “as a process of disorientation and reorientation: as bodies ‘move away’ as well as ‘arrive’, as they reinhabit spaces” (9), and raises the question of how “home and being-at-home” are affected “when one leaves home” (Ahmed 2000, 77). I want to reflect on this question by analyzing four songs by the Zollhausboys. I want to know how home is memorialized and if there are any indications of reorientation and reinhabiting a new homely space. I start with Kobani written by Ismaeel Foustok and Pago Balke, sung by Shvan Sheikho, followed by Pago Balke and Ismaeel Foustok’s Aleppo, which both deal mostly with homes that had to be left behind. The singers describe the places they were forced to leave because of the war, singing about feelings of loss and nostalgic longing. In the third song, “Raindance” [Regen am Fenster], by Azad Kour, we meet a different perspective, where the old home and elements of a new home are intertwined. The fourth song, Werder-Jacke, also by Azad, focuses exclusively on the new environment, dealing with how to cope by thematizing, in a satirical and self-­ ironical manner, a cultural clash while at the same time expressing the need for rebuilding familiarity. The song sung by Shvan Sheikho is explicitly a love song, where the Syrian city Kobane is personified and addressed as a lover whom the singer was forced to leave but promises to return to as soon as possible. This intimate relationship is already expressed in the title. The last vowel in the name of the town is changed from e to i, Kobane becoming Kobani; thereby adding, according to Arabic grammar, a possessive pronoun to the name of the town, changing it into my Kobane. Consequently, the pronoun “you” is used throughout the text. In this song the lost home is remembered through the senses, especially smell. The singer can still feel the smell of the town: “Your smell is still in my nose” [Dein Geruch liegt mir in der Nase], and he remembers the scent of bread that made him feel drunk [Am Duft der Brote kann man sich besaufen].2 Though far away from Kobane he can still feel the warmth of 2

 All translations from German to English by Christine Farhan.

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the town [Deine Wärme spür ich in jeder Phase]. The singer refers to a location where he met his friends: “In the evenings in summer we sat outdoors to eat in the cold of the night” [Abends im Sommer, ham wir draussen gesessen, um in der Kühle der Nacht noch zu essen]. He gets “goose bumps” when he remembers the past [Schon wieder krige ich ne Gänsehaut]. Feelings of loss, estrangement and displacement are central to the song. In Germany, the singer is desperately homesick and often bangs his head against the wall [Ich rannte im sicheren deutschen Land, vor Heimweh schon oft gegen die Wand]. He reassures his lover: “Kobani, I will stay on for a little while, but then I’ll return to help you back on your feet and then I will shed tears of sorrow and happiness” [Eine Zeit, Kobani, bleib ich hier noch. Dann komm ich und helfe dir wieder hoch, Kobani, ich komme zu dir zurück und ich werde weinen vor Trauer und Glück]. By comparison, Pago Balke and Ismaeel Foustok’s song starts with a recitation of a poem in Arabic. Even without understanding the language and the meaning of the words one can undoubtedly say that this poem is about sorrow. The rhythm, the voice, the intonation, and the repeated interjection “ooh” clearly express pain and suffering. This first impression is confirmed when the text is translated: “Aleppo, source of sorrow that spreads in my country, so much blood has been spilled, ooh, I am crying burning blood over my country, over my children buried in the ground, ooh, my country ….”3 The singer recalls his hometown, in this case Aleppo, in a similar way as in the previous song, through sensuous memories. In this song, too, smell, the smell of barbecue for example, has a central significance: “You know the best thing about Aleppo: there was barbequeing everywhere, the smell was ravishing” [wisst ihr, was das schönste an Aleppo war, an jeder Ecke grillen sie, es riecht wunderbar]. He also refers to a location, a “special hill among all the houses” [einen kleinen Hügel im grossen Häusermeer], where he met friends, remembering what they did together: “smoke, chill, and of course barbeque” [geraucht, gechillt und natürlich jede Menge … gegrillt]. The singer recalls the special atmosphere of the city. He calls it a “creative chaos” [kreatives Chaos], and mentions the special sounds of the city, “yelling and roaring,” that he connects to “business everywhere” [überall

3  For the translation from Arabic to Swedish I thank Imad Farhan: “Aleppo, källan till sorg som sprider sig i mitt land, så mycket blod har spillts, oooh, jag gråter brinnande blod över mitt land, över mina barn som blivit till jord, oooh mitt land …”

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Business, Fabriken und Gebrüll].4 This atmosphere of ongoing activity in everyday life he sums up as an “awesome feeling” [es war etwas los, ein geiles Gefühl]. The similarities to the first song are obvious but there is a shift of attitude too. The single-track retrospective that was offered in Aleppo is expanded on in this song. While this song exclusively addresses the city he had to leave, the singer in Aleppo turns to the audience in the new environment, the German town Bremen. He wants the listener to understand who he is and what he left behind. He starts by describing a picture of Bremen in 1945, destroyed by the war: “In 1945 this beautiful town had been bombed to the ground, simply flattened” [1945 war diese schöne Stadt zerbombt, am Boden, einfach platt]. By that he creates a connection between his hometown Aleppo and the new town, Bremen, requesting of the people in the new environment to remember their own war experiences and the sufferings caused by the war. He thereby starts with appealing to the solidarity of the listener, expressing that war can affect us all by drawing a line from World War II to the war in Syria. Starting off like this, referring to his audience’s own experience and history, he creates a sense of belonging, aiming at going beyond a self-presentation as a stranger. The refrain is conversational, the singer introducing himself by telling the audience where he comes from [da komme ich her]. He is eager to point out the importance of his hometown, its long history, and it being an industrial center: “My town was the economic center of the country” [Meine Stadt war das Zentrum der Wirtschaft im Land]. With this, he indirectly contradicts other representations of his country and its people that predominantly show poverty in premodern agrarian areas. Furthermore, he also emphasizes religious open-mindedness by highlighting that, “in Aleppo, all religions were accepted, Muslims as well as Christians, mosques and churches closely side by side” [in Aleppo lebten alle Religionen gut, Muslime und Christen …, Moscheen und Kirchen, dicht and dicht]. So, in this song there are distinct strategies to lessen the distance between Syria and Germany by involving perspectives on both the old and the new country, comparing them and addressing the listeners directly by explaining who the singer is and where he comes from. In this 4  Even in the interview Ismaeel refers to familiar sounds. He misses the sounds from the mosques that announce the beginning of the prayer. To compensate for that he has programmed his cell phone to remind him. I ask him if religion plays an important role. His answer is vague: “Yes, in this case it does.”

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respect this song points to ways of overcoming disorientation and facilitating reorientation. In another song, Azad’s Regen am Fenster, the connection between the old and the new home becomes even more distinct—again—through the senses, and—again—through smell, the smell of rain in both Syria and Germany. This is an even stronger shift of focus from the old home to the new one. While the first songs mostly deal with loss, the third song also is about gain, configuring sensations from the old home with sensations in the new one. Azad’s singer describes a Proustian moment of what could be called involuntary memory, or memory triggered by the senses. Just as the famous madeleine cake in Proust’s novel did not trigger any memories until the narrator tasted and smelled it, in Azad’s song we could say rain did not trigger any memory before he smelled it. In this song, the sense of smell is not activated by recalling memories of the lost home, as in the first two songs, but here the smell has its origins in the new environment, the refugee camp, the Zollhaus. The new locality intrudes on the senses, forms a new experience in the form of a sensation. Sitting at the window in the camp the singer is suddenly deeply affected by the smell of rain. It reminds him of his home country, a special smell that only occurs when there has been a long period of drought. In a metaphorical manner, Azad describes the situation, or, rather, sensation, by comparing the dry earth with wrinkled old skin, the grass with hay, and suggests that the water there is as valuable as silver [Die Erde, rissig, wie alte Haut, die Gräser trocken wie Heu und das Wasser kostbar wie Silber]. He creates a dramatic situation of waiting that is released in the climax of the first drop of rain—underlined by an onomatopoetic batsch—followed by thousands and thousands of other raindrops, thus activating the sense of sound. Of course, the rain, or waiting for the rain to come, can be easily understood as a metaphor for the refugee waiting for his permission to stay. The smell of rain is equated with happiness, a happiness that is possible to regain in a country where supportive people have taken care of the singer: “I have met people, they are really good and kind” [ich hab ein paar Leute kennengelernt, das sind echt gute und nette Leute]; “I am lucky that I live in security” [ich hab Glück, dass ich in Sicherheit lebe]; and he is aware that “millions of people in my country are not that lucky” [Millionen Menschen in meinem Land haben dieses Glück nicht]. The singer does not only dwell on the memories of the past, but he connects these memories with new sensual impressions. He does not only pass on his sadness about

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loss, but the smell of rain also evokes thoughts about gain, referring to the present, the here and now. In an ironic and humorous manner, Azad Kour’s song Werder-Jacke deals with the importance of familiarity in the new environment, in this case coming about for the wrong reasons, by misunderstanding. The singer, taking the position of a naïve and ignorant refugee in need of clothes to keep him warm, happens to find a piece of clothing that turns out to be the kind of sweater worn by supporters of the popular football club Werder Bremen. Not being aware of this, just noticing that the sweater does its job, the singer is overwhelmed by the warm reactions of Germans he meets in the streets. He does not know that the welcoming gestures are not aimed at him as a refugee but as a supporter of the football club: “Everybody is smiling, laughing, shouting, calling, are pleased almost all the time. Why are they so kind? I don’t have a clue “[Die Leute lächeln, grinsen, rufen, freuen sich fast immer. Warum sind sie so nett, ich habe keinen Schimmer]. Praising the new city, he tells his parents on the phone that everybody in the new town welcomes him with open arms: “I call my parents and tell them about Bremen, that everybody welcomes me in this town” [Ich rufe meine Eltern an und schwärme laut von Bremen, dass hier mich alle Menschen in ihre Stadt aufnehmen]. He feels invited to a new community, not aware that it is the community of the football fan club. On top of this there is a humorous play with colors in the refrain. The words “forever green white” [lebenslang Grün Weiss] refer to the colors of the football club and are borrowed from the original fan song. But in connection with forced migration the color white activates other connotations, notably, those of skin color, often an occasion for racist associations. Nevertheless, in the football community the colors of the club seem to have a stronger sociocultural significance than the color of the skin. Skin color can obviously fade away under the strong impact of “green white forever.” This story about a misunderstanding and a cultural clash underlines the importance of everyday culture, in this case connected to sports and sport-­ supporting networks, for establishing a new home. Furthermore, the sweater is a means of communication and positioning, highlighting the importance of clothes as a semiotic system. Dress codes speak their own language; they tell who you are and what group you want to belong to. Referring to Ahmed one could understand the sweater as a second, expanding skin that “provides us with perspective,” constituting an arena for sociocultural interacting.

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Moving Away and Arriving by Reinhabiting Space In the first three songs, home and familiarity are constituted through affects. The localities referred to are not real places; more important is their socio-spatial significance, the happy memories of being together with friends having a good time in an atmosphere of relaxed intimacy. This already makes it perfectly clear that “[t]he question of home and being-at-­ home can only be addressed by considering the question of affect: being-­ at-­home is a matter of how one feels …” (Ahmed 2000, 89). Home is “the lived experience of locality, its sounds and smells” (Avtar Brah qtd. in Ahmed 2000, 89). The lost home becomes “a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination” and in that respect “a place of no return” (Ahmed 2000, 89). This is clearly expressed in the first song. Paradoxically it is most obvious that the town Kobane that the singer is missing and longing for so desperately is “a place of no return.” This is not verbalized but nevertheless expressed between the lines because of the private and mystifying manner of anthropomorphizing the town and hyperbolically repeating the promise of coming back. The mode of telling indicates that this probably will never come true. The singer remains in a space of nostalgia, combining the memory of home with pain, and feelings of homesickness. The memorialized localities of the hometowns, Kobane in the first and Aleppo in the second song, are “memoryscapes” (Keightley and Pickering 2017, 154), rather than geographical landscapes. They are imaginary landscapes of the home country, created through memories, where the lines between memory and imagination are blurred. These memoryscapes are evoked by sensuous experience, by “what one smells, hears, touches, feels, remembers.” Ahmed calls the space of intrusion “a second skin”, “… a skin which does not simply contain the homely subject, but which allows the subject to be touched and touch the world that is neither simply in the home or away from the home” (Ahmed 2000, 89). To define home as (a second) skin invokes Ahmed’s conception of skin as “neither within nor outside bodily space,” a space that can rather be understood as an arena for the embodiment of senses and affects, like the goose bumps mentioned in Kobani, or sweating, rashes, and blushing. Skin is permeable, like a membrane, a zone where interior and exterior spaces form new experiences of home. Ahmed explains that “[t]he home as skin suggests that the boundary between self and home is permeable, but also that the boundary between home and away is permeable as well” (Ahmed 2000, 89). Migration stories, in Ahmed’s conception, are skin

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memories: “memories of different sensations that are felt on the skin” (Ahmed 2000, 92). These are referred to in different ways in the songs: in the first song, Kobani, there is just one perspective, the retrospective, the nostalgic longing back home, expressed through sensuous impressions of smells and sounds that still inhabit the body and evoke, for example, goose bumps. In the second song, Aleppo, the retrospective is conveyed in a similar way, focusing on how memoryscapes intrude on the senses, but a move towards the present, the here and now, can be noticed. In the third example, Azad’s song about rain, the singer is touched by a sensation, the smell of rain that serves as a mediator to produce a sense of continuity and coherence, connecting the past with the present. This connection opens up for perceiving the new place in a more optimistic way, providing a “mnemonic imagination,” that is, “opportunities for the disparate fragments of homeland and host land to be woven together into a relatively new and coherent narrative in which points of identification and belonging could begin to be reconfigured” (Keightley and Pickering 2017, 136f). The singer is able to reconcile “what is lost from a past place with what is gained in new places of belonging and habitation” (Keightley and Pickering 2017, 154). In this way “cohesive memory” (Keightley and Pickering 2017, 150) is shaped by forging new links between the past and the present. While the first songs are mainly about loss, the third song, providing explicit examples of appreciation of the new environment, is also about the “active construction of domestic spaces as locations of belonging” (Keightley and Pickering 2017, 147). While the singers in Kobani and Aleppo present themselves as strangers, Azad, in the rain song, does not. Because Kobani is exclusively about the inability to feel at home, the song expresses a significant gap, a discontinuity between past and present. In Aleppo we can observe an incipient reorientation, a “stretching out” towards the new home. The third song deals with reinhabiting a new space by a sensuous experience, the smell of rain. The fourth song deals with active construction of domestic spaces. In this song home literally becomes a second skin, materialized in the Werder Bremen sweater, emphasizing the significance of everyday cultural competence that supports reinhabitation and reorientation in the new environment. These songs offer different practices of what Keightley and Pickering call “mnemonic imagination” of the home, understood, according to Ahmed, as memories felt through and on the skin. Stretching out to embody new spaces is thematized in the songs in different ways, indicating different potentials of (re-)orientation and (re-)inhabitation.

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Part Two: For me, Actually, It Was Not That Hard Turning now to the interview situation with Ismaeel, it was very interesting to see how he used songs in order to explain who he is. I could not help noticing an unexpected difference between the refugee narrative expressed by the answers to my questions and the story he told by referring to different songs during the interview. Ismaeel introduced himself as a pragmatic and rational storyteller, presenting a narrative without any dramatic events, rather treating forced migration as an adventure, certainly hard but not life-threatening. He underpinned this attitude by mentioning the discrepancy between information about migration he got in Syria before leaving, and his own experience of the trip. In his opinion, threats and dangers had been magnified enormously: “It was so extreme, what I heard and was told … things were oversized … I mean anxieties and dangers “[es war enorm, es war so riesig, was man gehört hat, es wurde vieles erzählt … die Sachen wurden viel grösser … also die Ängste und die Gefahr]. This appeared to him as an exaggeration considering his own flight, which he preferred to call “a journey in time” [Zeitreise] or “between countries” [Länderreise]. It seemed important to him to point out that it was not difficult: “I would not say it was very tough, it was an experience, of course there was danger, but as it were, I did not feel threatened for my life. For me, actually, it was not that hard “[Ich würd’ es auch nicht als so schwer bezeichnen, ich würd’ nicht sagen, es war so eisenhart oder so, es war ‘n Erlebnis, es war Gefahr dabei, es war, sag ich mal, aber nicht Lebensgefahr. Für mich war’s einfach nicht schlimm]. So, he presented himself in the interview as quite “cool,” a rather noncommitted, dispassionate person. A different picture appeared, as I have shown above, in his song “Aleppo,” which deals with passionate feelings and strong emotions of loss. I don’t perceive these different voices as contradictory. I rather understand them as different modes of ongoing identity work during the interview, with the interviewee using different aesthetic expressions, speech and song, to navigate through the experience of forced migration. Ismaeel negotiates different modes of self-­ presentation, striving towards a stable position, or to reconnect to Ahmed, towards “reorientation” in new spaces. Towards me, the interviewer—a white, established career woman, who intended to use his experience for academic research—he chose the dispassionate voice, probably also as a result of being on his guard and somewhat suspicious. He strived for an objective, matter-of-fact account of his

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experience, presenting himself as a strong, courageous and competent individual. Perhaps he simply didn’t want to appear weak before me. But turning to songs allowed for more emotional intimacy. They let him express feelings that he perhaps was not able to put into words and that provided space for the sensuous dimension of his experience. He presented the first song to me when I asked him about his understanding of home. Instead of an answer he played a song by Georg Kreisler from 1968, “Neither nor” [Weder noch], where the issue of home is discussed and summed up in the position that home for a refugee is just an illusion: “You never have a home” [Man hat niemals ein Zuhause]. As a migrant you have to handle a lot of problems, you have to work harder, but you should avoid self-pity, and you should not get mad at other persons. The song concludes in the following way: “You must know you are just like all the others, but, especially that, the others don’t want to realize” [Denn man muss wissen: Man ist ganz so wie die Andern—Nur dass die Andern grade das nicht wissen wolln!]. Ismaeel uses this song to express a facet of his identity. Despite the message of the song—as a migrant you will never have a home—he engages in a homebuilding activity by referring to it. He connects his own experience to another historic period of forced migration during Nazi Germany. Kreisler migrated in 1939 to the United States when he was forced to leave Austria because of his Jewish background. The song ends with a statement that Ismaeel, perhaps inspired by Kreisler, picked up in his own song “Aleppo,” where the singer addresses his audience by presenting himself as one of them. No doubt, referring to the song “Weder noch,” despite its message, allows Ismaeel to establish a form of belonging, belonging to the community of all migrants in the world at all times, sharing the same experience over time, longing to be like all the others, when others don’t want to accept them as equals. This brings Ahmed’s question to the fore: “How can we make a space that is supportive? How can we become friends?” and by that expressing “the very desire to make a community” (Ahmed 2000, 94) that could provide a new form of home, recognizing and being recognized, not as a stranger but as a friend. To further explain who he is, Ismaeel presents one more song in the interview, another one of his own: “Hero” [Held]. The singer, the hero, is a person who, despite anxiety and fear—“we couldn’t endure any more fear” [die Angst war kaum noch zu ertragen]—was courageous and brave enough to risk the dangerous flight and cope with the difficult first time of desperation and impatience: “Therefore I decided to fight my way to

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Germany” [da habe ich beschlossen, mich nach Deutschland durchzuschlagen]. But in the end, “after two years, I could enjoy my victory and embrace my parents and my brothers “[Doch nach zwei Jahren konnt’ ich endlich meinen Sieg genießen und meine Eltern und die Brüder in die Arme schließen]. The singer is equipped with strong agency, taking his destiny into his own hands and acting responsibly by helping his family to escape and to reunite, not without feeling proud of his success. This song, too, does not fit the stereotype of the disempowered, victimized refugee; rather, it aims at assuring the listener of the singer’s strength and independence. In this song his grandfather’s hat, given to the singer before the departure, plays an important role. It is a symbol for the love and the support of the family left behind, giving him the strength to go through all his miseries, and the self-confidence to say out loud: I am a hero. “Perhaps I was lucky, persistent and brave, but a great support was certainly grandfather’s hat” [Vielleicht hatte ich Glück, Ausdauer oder Mut, doch ganz bestimmt geholfen hat mir Opas Hut]. In other words, the hat represents the link between past, present and future, suggesting that a refugee cannot regain strength and affiliation to the new environment without connecting to who he/she was in the past. Bringing past and present together provides the strength to overcome obstacles and miseries and to develop a confident attitude towards the future. Turning to songs during the interview enabled Ismaeel to express what he could not tell in his own words. As in the rain-song by Azad, in this song, too, past and present are connected. In Azad’s song, the connecting link is the sensation of smell; in this song it is a symbolic item, his grandfather’s hat, that provided the singer with strength and support in his endeavors to overcome and endure the precarities of the new environment. In this respect, the smell of rain and the hat are metaphorical ways to forge cohesive memory through the senses.

Conclusion The combination of words with music, that is, songs, is an aesthetic expression and thus a modality for storytelling that allows for deeper understanding for the sensuous dimensions of the refugee experience and gives way for emotional intimacy beyond the interview situation. This became visible when analyzing the different positions that Ismaeel conveyed in the interview.

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Furthermore, analyzing song lyrics focusing on the concept of home could give hints about how it feels when bodies “‘move away’ as well as ‘arrive’” (Ahmed 2006, 9), and how this is experienced as skin sensations that provide the body with different perspectives. In this respect, Ahmed’s metaphor for home as a second skin can be understood as a phenomenology of the senses. Yet, in the songs analyzed above, the second skin has been extended to symbolic items dressing the body, a sweater and a hat, that represent the new and the old cultural contexts. The songs can help us understand how it feels to arrive and to stretch out again and to have the courage and the ambition to reinhabit new space that could—eventually—be called home.

Appendix: Song Lyrics Kobani (Written by Ismaeel Foustok and Pago Balke)5 Du bist wirklich nicht sehr modern Altmodisch bist du, das hab’ ich gern Nicht attraktiv an allen Ecken Deine Schönheit muss man erst entdecken Dein Geruch liegt mir in der Nase Deine Wärme spür ich in jeder Phase Du hast mich 15 Jahre getragen Bist Schutz in guten und schlechten Tagen Kobani … Kobani ich hab’ es gesehn und gehört Du liegst am Boden geschändet und zerstört Meine Heimat Kobani fast alles kaputt Nur Blut, Asche und Schutt Früh morgens bin ich durch die Straßen gelaufen Am Duft der Brote kann man sich besaufen Abends im Sommer, ham wir draußen gesessen Um in der Kühle der Nacht noch zu essen Überall Freunde, die reden und trinken Ich könnte gerade vor Sehnsucht versinken Dann sind die Schüsse und Bomben gekommen 5  Song performances can be  found on  YouTube, and  lyrics have been transcribed by Christine Farhan. Lyrics to Werder-Jacke and Held have generously been made available by the songwriters.

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Und ich habe den Strohhalm der Flucht aufgenommen Kobani … Kobani du bist wie ein Heimatbaum Dass er gefällt ist, begreife ich kaum Dort hab ich gespielt, mich alles getraut Schon wieder krieg ich ne Gänsehaut Ich rannte im sicheren deutschen Land Vor Heimweh schon oft gegen die Wand Andererseits, es ist hier nicht schlecht Fremd und spannend, ich komme zurecht Kobani … Eine Zeit, Kobani, bleib ich hier noch Dann komm ich und helfe dir wieder hoch Kobani, ich komme zu dir zurück Und ich werde weinen vor Trauer und Glück

Aleppo (Written by Pago Balke and Ismaeel Foustok) ‫حلب … اينبع من الامل … مييش يف بالدي‬ ‫ايكرث دم اليل نسكب‬ ‫اه اان ببيك من دم حمروق عىل بالدي و والدي اليل صارو فهيا تراب‬ ‫اه ايبالدي‬.. Ich hab mal ‘n Bild von Bremen gesehn, da blieb kein Stein auf dem anderen stehn, 1945 war die schöne Stadt, zerbombt, am Boden, einfach platt. So sieht jetzt heute meine Stadt aus, siehst du die Bilder, das hältst du nich’ aus. Das ist die Stadt, in der ich aufgewachsen bin, vier Millionen Leute und ich mittendrin. Refrain Das is Aleppo, da komme ich her, ich floh über Land, ich kam übers Meer das ist Aleppo, da komme ich her ich floh über Land, ich kam übers Meer. Wisst ihr was das Schönste an Aleppo war an jeder Ecke grillen sie, es riecht wunderbar. Ich hatte mit’n paar Freunden, es ist gar nicht lange her, einen kleinen Hügel im großen Häusermeer. Den hatten sie vielleicht vergessen zu bebaun da ham wir uns jeden Tag ins Gras gehaun.

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was ham wir da gemacht, geraucht und gechillt und natürlich jede Menge mitgegrillt Das ist Aleppo … Meine Stadt war das Zentrum der Wirtschaft im Land, bei uns auch kreatives Chaos genannt. Überall Business, Fabriken und Gebrüll, es war etwas los, ein geiles Gefühl. Meine Stadt ist zehntausend Jahre alt, die Vergangenheit ist ausgelöscht, das lässt mich nich’ kalt. Ich möchte gerne wieder durch Bazare streifen, die gibt es nich mehr, kaum zu begreifen. Das ist Aleppo … Kein Problem, nur heirate nicht. In Aleppo stehen heute fünf Parteien im Krieg. Einige prahlen jetzt mit ihrem Sieg. Und bei aller Scheiße ist kein Ende in Sicht. So friedlich wie früher wird es jedenfalls nicht. Das ist Aleppo … Das ist Aleppo, da komme ich her So wie es war, das gibt es nicht mehr Das ist Aleppo, da komme ich her So wie es war, das gibt es nicht mehr.

Regen Am Fenster (Written by Azad Kour) Regen am Fenster Es war viele Tage trocken geblieben Was in Deutschland ja nicht so oft vorkommt Ich sitze am offenen Fenster, als es anfängt zu regnen Es riecht wunderbar Ich bin plötzlich aufgewühlt Es ist der Geruch meines Heimatlandes Um zu verstehen wie es ist Wenn in meinem Land der Regen einsetzt

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Muss man die Wochen und Monate ohne Regen erlebt haben Ohne einen einzigen Tropfen Regen Wenn die Hitze so stark ist Dass der Erdboden in Wellen flimmert Die Erde, rissig, wie alte Haut Die Gräser trocken wie Heu Und das Wasser kostbar wie Silber Und dann eines Tages wird die Luft schwer Reglos und schwer Und der Himmel verdunkelt sich Wie die Nacht bei Tag Ein grosser Tropfen zerplatzt auf dem Boden Batsch Und noch einer: batsch Ein anderer, tausend andere Es regnet Das Land in meiner Heimat dann vor Freude Es riecht so wunderbar Ein bisschen so wie hier am Fenster Das auf die regennasse deutsche Straße blickt Den Geruch meiner Heimat, ich kann ihn nicht in den besten Geschäften der Welt kaufen Ich wurde dazu gezwungen, diesen Duft zu verlassen Ich habe das schönste in der Welt verloren Ich hab das Heimatland, ich hab das Glück verlorn Ich hab aber ein anders Glück wiedergefunden In einem schönen und guten Land Das Land, das sich um mich gekümmert hat Ich hab ein paar Leute kennengelernt Das sind echt gute und nette Leute Die Sonne scheint von der Mitte der Welt Und scheint in meinem Land zuerst Und dann scheint sie in der übrigen Welt Und trotzdem hatten wir Krieg Wir hatten keine Elektrik mehr Aber wir genossen es in die Sterne zu schauen in der Nacht Wir saßen beim Essen und hörten die Schüsse und Bomben Sie waren ein Teil von unserem Leben Ich hab’ Glück, dass ich in Sicherheit lebe Millionen Menschen in meinem Land Haben dieses Glück nicht

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Werder-Jacke (Written by Azad Kour) Ich bin nach langem Weg in Deutschland angekommen Und hatte auf der Flucht keine Kleidung mitgenommen In Bremen gab es Leute, die brachten alte Sachen Und wollten mit Klamotten uns eine Freude machen Im grossen Kleiderhaufen hab ich sie gefunden Sehr grün und auch sehr warm Sah ich ganz weit unten Eine Jacke mit so Bildern und beschriftet mit viel Fleiß Ich verstand natürlich nichts von lebenslang Grün-Weiß Es ist so schön und angenehm In meiner Jacke von Werder Bremen Ich ging von unsrer großen Halle gerne in die Stadt Natürlich mit der Jacke, dass man was Warmes hat Die Leute lächeln grinsen, rufen, freuen sich fast immer Warum sind sie so nett, ich habe keinen Schimmer Ich rufe meine Eltern an und schwärme laut von Bremen Dass hier mich alle Menschen in ihre Stadt aufnehmen Man spricht mich dauernd an, es wird gesungen und gepfiffen Dass das an meiner Jacke liegt, hab ich spät begriffen Es ist so schön … Und dann nach ein paar Monaten geschah die Sensation Ich kriege eine Karte zum Weser Stadion Na klar geh ich nich’ ohne meine Superjacke hin Und tu’, als ob ich ewig schon ein Werder-Fan bin Ich sitze neben einem großen dicken deutschen Mann Und plötzlich fällt er auf die Signatur an Tor, schreien alle und der Dicke springt auf Umarmt mich und drückt mich und hört gar nicht mehr auf Es ist so schön … Auf dem Weg nach Hause treff’ ich einen Freund Der sieht gar nicht gut aus und der meint Ich habe zu der Deutsche echt null Kontakt Gibt mir einen Tip, ich fühl mich so beknackt

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Ich sage, Habibi, ich sag dir, wie das geht Um Werder-Fan zu werden ist es nie zu spät Mit dieser Jacke bleibt deine Seele heil Lebenslang Grün-Weiss ist einfach nur geil Es ist so schön …

Held (Written by Ismaeel Foustok) Dass ich aus Aleppo komme, wissen viele Leute Dass ich auch ein Held bin, sag ich euch erst heute. Okay, zugegeben: nur die Familie nennt mich so, Weil ich ganz alleine aus Aleppo floh Der Krieg kam über uns, wie Regen im August Wir haben damals aus der Not nur diesen Weg gewusst Die Angst war kaum noch zu ertragen Da habe ich beschlossen, mich nach Deutschland durchzuschlagen! Refrain Bist du ein Niemand, bist du ein Held? Geh deinen Weg durch diese Welt! Bist du ein Niemand, bist du ein Held? Freundschaft und Liebe, das ist es, was zählt! Meinen Opa, den ich liebe, habe ich besucht, Um mich zu verabschieden, kurz vor meiner Flucht. Er hat mir seinen Hut geschenkt und sagte: „Es wird schwer: Du musst durch viele Länder laufen und schwimmen über das Meer. Es ist dein Weg, um Mann zu werden, mein Hut, Er bringt dir Glück, Ich hoffe nur, bevor ich sterb’, bist du zurück! Wenn du es schaffst, dann werden dich alle einen Held nennen. Nun lauf schon los, sonst fang ich hier noch furchtbar an zu flennen!“ Refrain Bist du ein Niemand, bist du ein Held? Geh deinen Weg durch diese Welt! Bist du ein Niemand, bist du ein Held? Freundschaft und Liebe, das ist es, was zählt!

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Als ich hier ankam, war ich einsam und allein Und dachte, so ein Scheißgefühl muss wohl für Helden sein! Es halfen nette Leute mir auf dem Weg zum Ziel, ansonsten galt ich hier im Land als Flüchtling echt nicht viel. Meine Stimmung, meine Hoffnung waren oft im Keller, ich war fast am Verzweifeln: Warum geht das denn nicht schneller? Doch dann nach zwei Jahren konnt ich endlich meinen Sieg genießen und meine Eltern und die Brüder in die Arme schließen! Refrain Bist du ein Niemand … Momentan schau ich zurück und frag’ mich dabei: Held ist so ein großes Wort, fast Wichtigtuerei. Ich war gezwungen, so zu handeln, Ich konnte es nicht ändern Und Abenteuer war es auch, der Weg zu neuen Ländern. Hast du es in der Hand, wie das Schicksal mit dir spielt? Ich glaube, es ist subjektiv, ob man als Held sich fühlt. Vielleicht hatte ich Glück, Ausdauer oder Mut Doch ganz bestimmt geholfen hat mir Opas Hut! Refrain Bist du ein Niemand …

References Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters. Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge. ———. 2006. Queer Phenomenology. Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press. Bruner, Jerome. 2004 [1987]. Life as Narrative. Social Research 71 (3): 691–710. Bui, Long. 2016. The Refugee Repertoire: Performing and Staging the Postmemories of Violence. In MELUS 41 (3): 112–132. Curry, Oscar, Charlotte Smedley, and Caroline Lenette. 2018. What is ‘Successful’ Resettlement? Refugee Narratives from Regional New South Wales in Australia. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 16 (4): 430–448.

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Deppermann, Arnulf. 2015. Positioning. In The Handbook of Narrative Analysis, ed. Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, 369–387. John Wiley & Sons. Keightley, Emily, and Michael Pickering. 2017. Memory and the Management of Change. Repossessing the Past. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Luhmann, Niklas. 2004. Trust and Power. John Wiley & Sons. Ryu, Minjung, and Mavreen Rose S.  Tuvilla. 2018. Resettled Refugee Youths’ Stories of Migration, Schooling, and Future: Challenging Dominant Narratives About Refugees. Urban Review 50: 539–558.

CHAPTER 6

Migrant and Radical: Political Migrant Theatre and Activism in Migrations: Harbour Europe Szabolcs Musca

Introduction In Simon Grangeat’s recent work Terres Closes [Closed Lands], originally written in 2011 and reworked in 2019, the play’s narrator affirms: You think you have arrived. But you still have a border to cross. If you do not have a visa, the border moves with you. If your status is irregular, you will always be left with a border to cross. (Grangeat 2019, 34)1 1

 All translations used are by Laure Fernandez and LegalAliens theatre company (2019).

S. Musca (*) Department of Theatre, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK Centre for Theatre Studies, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Classon Frangos, S. Ghose (eds.), Refugee Genres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2_6

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Closed Lands was written as a response to a specific refugee case in France witnessed by the author at his neighbourhood’s kindergarten. An African migrant was arrested by the police in front of his children, sent to a detention centre and removed from the country, later being allowed back in as a result of protests and community pressure (Theatre Contemporain 2019). This case is far from being unique in demonstrating the often brutal reality of the European asylum system. The play that emerged from the playwright’s encounter with this real-life narrative reflects on the profound political violence faced by refugees and their lack of political agency in this context. Grangeat’s play was a key part of Migrations: Harbour Europe (2019/ 2020), a recent UK-based theatre project I embarked on in 2018 as project lead of Migrant Dramaturgies Network—an international research network on migrant theatre and performance—developed in collaboration with the London-based LegalAliens Theatre, in the capacity of artistic lead.2 In this chapter I will draw on the project to explore how migrant theatre initiatives can practice resistance, political responsiveness and solidarity while resisting established narratives and fostering new aesthetics of migration and refugeedom. Theatre, and especially migrant theatre has a unique capacity to make states of displacement and asylum visible, to intervene in mainstream narratives of migration and meaning making, and to foster and promote shared visions across social, political and cultural divides. I am using the term migrant theatre here instead of the more widespread theatre(s) of migration or theatre and migration, to signal the importance of theatre and performance work created by and/or with migrants rather than about them. The past decade has seen a surge of migrant theatre initiatives from across Europe addressing issues of displacement, identity and belonging, social inequalities, and legacies of colonialism. However, migrant theatre-makers remain under-represented in public culture and in theatre institutions, due largely to persistently mono-lingual and mono-cultural programming and repertoires both in the UK and in mainland Europe. Consequently, platforming theatre created by migrant artists has become increasingly important for promoting inclusive change, addressing marginalisation, or as Emma Cox argues, to ‘demarcate an alternative imagined community’ (Cox 2014, 48). In Cox’ 2  The project was funded by Arts Council England, partners included the Migrants’ Resource Centre in Tottenham and Harringay Welcome, London.

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view, ‘theatre of migration’– as she calls it—is ‘theatre and performance that is responsive to different contexts of migration’ (6). Parallel with performance works, significant research has also emerged in the last decade examining migrant theatre in the context of exile (Meerzon 2012), refugeedom (Jeffers 2012; Balfour 2013; Skeiker 2021), as well as statelessness (Wilmer 2018) and cosmopolitanism (Meerzon 2020), new interculturalism (McIvor 2016) and multilingualism (Meerzon and Pewny 2019). Theatre scholarship on postmigrant theatre (Hill and Yildiz 2018), asylum (Cox and Wake 2018) and inclusion (Carpani and Malini 2019) has shed light on new aesthetics, narratives and functions cultivated by migrant theatre, contributing to understanding the aesthetics and artistic modalities of migrant representation. As I critically reflect on the perspectives fostered by Migrations: Harbour Europe, I will focus especially on the artistic, cultural and structural practices and dramaturgies activated by Closed Lands. I will argue that this project positions migrant identities and experiences firmly in the socio-­ political realm and advocates for a rethinking of contemporary societies as migration societies. Emma Cox argues that the societal landscape against which migrant theatre is produced is intrinsic to understanding systemic issues related to migration. She notes that ‘theatre of migration is at its most basic level implicated with, and troubled by power relations within the broader society’ (Cox 2014, 27). As such, migrant theatre looks at issues of refuge, asylum and indeed mobility as structural components of societies rather than temporary challenges with short-term solutions, as often presented during the heights of the so called European ‘refugee crisis’. Theatre as a live art genre that builds on the continuous dialogue and interaction between theatre-makers and audiences (roles that often overlap in contemporary performance), is well placed to mediate complex migrant perspectives and experiences. Migrant self-representation is of key importance when it comes to conveying migrant stories, as both Closed Lands and the larger project position migrant artists at the centre of representation. The opening aim of Migrations: Harbour Europe was to find key texts that addressed the theme of migrancy. We worked with a transnational collective of theatre-makers, researchers and cultural workers in developing and producing the project, acting on multiple levels of artistic and cultural creation and development. A Europe-wide open call was launched in 2018, seeking contemporary plays dealing with migratory identities and experiences. The response was overwhelming: we received one hundred

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and fifty-seven play submissions from around seventeen countries from across Europe and beyond. Submissions included a considerable number of works created by migrant and minority ethnic playwrights challenging dominant modes of representation through their engagement with diverse cultural and indeed theatrical contexts referencing knowledges of the global South and the underrepresented fringes of Europe. Three plays were selected by an international panel of readers: La Mer est ma nation (The Sea is My Nation, 2017) by Hala Moughanie, Chiara Boscaro’s Genesi:pentateuco #1 (Genesis: Pentateuch #1, 2018) and the previously mentioned Closed Lands by Simon Grangeat.3 Building on these three pieces by emerging European playwrights, LegalAliens’ artistic director, Lara Parmiani led a series of workshops with migrants and refugees at the Migrants’ Resource Centre in Tottenham (London), using extracts of the plays as a provocation. These community sessions ran parallel with the company’s work on staged readings, directed by Becka McFadden. The plays were translated and presented as staged readings during a three-day programme at London’s Arcola Theatre in February 2019, performed by a multilingual international cast with various migration backgrounds who spoke some of the lines in their first language.4 Each performance was followed by open conversations and public debates led by theatre scholars and board members of Migrant Dramaturgies Network.5 Through the diverse representations in these works and the nuanced, contradictory and human narratives seen through the portrayal of the characters and their respective narrative arcs, these plays countered the concept of the singular stories and offered the opportunity for points of connectivity, recognition and resistance. In much of the audience’s feedback, we saw that the original aim of the project allowed audiences to look beyond established narratives common in general perception and media representations related to migration. Some audience members pointed out the complexities of the characters presented; others recognised their own migration 3  Four submissions that did not make the final selection, but were certainly outstanding, received special mentions: Welcome to Bulgaria by Zdrava Kamenova and Gergana Dimitrova, Orli by Tino Caspanello, Un mouchoir dans le ronce by Anne- Christine Tinel, and Sous le Pont by Abdulrahman Khallouf. 4  Creative team: Luiana Bonfim (Angola/Portugal), Daiva Dominyka (Lithuania), Lara Parmiani (Italy), Stelios Trakas (Greece). 5  Details of conversations and debates including links to recordings can be accessed at: https://www.newtidesplatform.org/migrations-harbour-europe-2019

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journeys in the plays presented, and there were several audience members who pointed out the interpersonal dimension of theatre especially in tackling complex human realities. Migrations: Harbour Europe was taken forward into full production by LegalAliens and Exchange Theatre (London) staging Closed Lands for the Vault Festival in March 2020. It posed an opportunity to further explore the complexities of identity as well as the fluidity of geo-political and cultural borders. I will discuss the project with a special emphasis on this particular theatre production, arguing for a narrative shift in our understandings of migrants and migrant cultures. The artistic project as a whole set out to intervene in public narratives of migration and to challenge the construct of ‘European others’—including ‘ethnicization that permanently defines ethnicized citizens as “migrants”’ (see El-Tayeb 2011, xiii- xiv). While originally written in non-­ British socio-political contexts, these plays resonated with the cultural and political transformations—and policy scandals—facing the UK. By the time of the staged readings in 2019 and early 2020, the UK experienced a series of crises triggered by Brexit, the Windrush Scandal, the controversies around the country’s new Immigration Bill6 and the Black Lives Matter Movement highlighting acute structural inequalities, racism and discrimination. While poignantly portraying displacement and difficult journeys, this project brought to the fore migrant and refugee artists, going beyond the platforming of migrant voices to bring their perspectives, artistic methodologies as well as the different cultural practices to a mainstream (British) cultural scene. The Covid-19 health crisis pushed the UK into lockdown days after Grangeat’s play closed at the Vault Festival in London in March 2020. The perspectives it cultivated, however, continued beyond the stage as LegalAliens’ ensemble joined forces with other UK-based first-generation migrant artists to advocate for change in migrant representation in the theatre and performance industry, establishing the Migrants in Theatre movement (MIT). I will return to migrant advocacy later on in the chapter, but first, I would like to consider the construction and deconstruction 6  Led by the then UK home secretary, Priti Patel, the new immigration bill introduces a point-based immigration system with no differentiation between EU and non-EU arrivals. One of its most controversial elements is the substantial overhaul of the asylum system, whereas asylum seekers who arrived illegally will no longer have the same rights as those who entered the UK through legal routes. They can only claim temporary refugee status and can be removed at short notice.

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of notions of strangeness, otherness and foreignness, so often used when describing migrants and migrant artists. Arguably, repositioning migrancy would also entail destabilising strategies of othering.

‘Stranger danger’ and Theatres of Migration In her well-known essay ‘We Refugees’, Hannah Arendt touches on an array of notions associated with the figure of the migrant in the aftermath of fascism in Europe and the late 1940s. She reflects on refugees as ‘newcomers’, ‘a new kind of human being’, ‘enemy aliens’, ‘Ulysses- wanderers’ (Arendt 1994, 110-119). While Arendt’s work references an all-together different political context, her understanding of refugeedom as a result of complex strategies of ‘othering’ (used by political parties, national institutions, and communities) still resonates amidst growing nationalism and socio-economic inequalities globally. If we only look at recent media narratives positioning ongoing migration and forced displacement within crisis narratives—especially as security crisis, for instance during the Brexit debate in the UK, or in communications from Frontex, the EU’s border security agency—as I have discussed elsewhere (see Musca 2019), we notice a strong re-emergence of the migrant as stranger. How can theatre intervene and challenge the construction of such xenophobic narratives, and equally, how can it foster an ethical encounter with migration? Examining difficult experiences and legacies of migrancy as well as the complexities of what it means to arrive, enables the creation of theatre about and/or with migrants, refugees and asylum seekers that goes beyond giving voice, while also entailing a critical (re)examination or questioning of the hosts society’s cultural, political and socio-economic positions, legacies and institutional structures. As I will show, the activism nurtured by Migrations: Harbour Europe moves beyond staging social injustice; it goes on to demand new models of representation. Before discussing such structural repositioning of the migrant voice off stage, I return to the figure of the migrant in order to understand LegalAliens Theatre’s performance appropriation of the stranger and issues of bordering. In her Strange Encounters, Sara Ahmed provides an important analysis of the figure of the migrant, showing how migrants are often positioned as strangers. She stresses that the ‘condition of being a stranger is determined by the event of leaving home’ (Ahmed 2000, 78). For Ahmed, strangers ‘are the ones who, in leaving the home of their nation, are the

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bodies out of place in the everyday world they inhabit, and in the communities in which they come to live’ (78). This definition of strangeness centres the triad of body–movement–community. The migrant existence is marked by its ‘presence in a contemporary landscape of dislocation and movement’ (79). Feeling and being displaced are intrinsic to understanding strangeness, but also key to thinking through notions of familiarity, home and belonging. Ahmed rightly observes that migration—and I would argue migrant theatre too—‘invite[s] us to consider what it means to be at home, to inhabit a particular place and might call us to question the relationship between identity, belonging and home’ (78). Navigating through the triad of body-movement-community not only defines migrant experiences of strangeness, but it should also be at the core of every ethical-­creative engagement with migrancy in theatre and performance. As I discuss below, migratory identities are not only forged through individual migration journey(s), but also through the systemic treatment of migrants in the countries to which they arrive. Currently, there is no legal definition of the migrant in UK law; migrancy is articulated through notions of ethnicity, national origins, heritage, citizenship, and nationality. In a recent manifesto by the UK-based Migrants in Culture, the organisation uses a rather capacious definition of migrants as people with: … lived experiences of migration in their lives … profiled as migrants because of the colour of their skin, their accent or other characteristics, regardless of their legal status. Migrants can have a variety of legal statuses, including as visa nationals, temporary or permanent residents, refugees or asylum seekers, traveller communities, undocumented or citizens. There are migrants who have been residing in the UK for a long time, those born of migrant parents, and those here for a shorter while (Migrants in Culture 2020, 4, original emphasis)

Migrants in Culture is a UK-based network of migrant culture workers and organisations, campaigning for better conditions for migrants in the UK culture sector. Their aim is to champion ‘safety, agency and solidarity’ for those ‘impacted by the UK’s immigration regime’ (Migrants in Culture 2021). Their definition clearly acknowledges the complexities of migrancy and migrant identities, while responding to issues of migrant rights, equity and inclusion vis-à-vis discourses on colonialism and state violence amidst

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the UK government’s ‘Hostile Environment’ policy.7 They argue that the wider UK immigration policy is a ‘manifestation of systemic racism and the legacies and continuation of empire, colonisation and extractive capitalism’ (Migrants in Culture 2021). Dismantling such systemic forms of discrimination therefore involves opposing oppression in all its forms. What also transpires from the above definition is the awareness of the migrant condition as historically layered. Ahmed notably reflects on the (multi)generational aspect of migrancy stressing that ‘migration is not only felt at the level of lived embodiment … [but] is also a matter of generational acts of story-telling about prior histories of movement and dislocation’ (2000, 90). Hence, positioning the migrant as the stranger is not enough in itself since this construct misses the long histories as well as the complex societal contexts (including structural conditions) creating and sustaining narratives of migrations. Ahmed thus argues, ‘To take the figure of the stranger as simply present is to overlook and forget the very relationships of social antagonism that produce the stranger as a figure in the first place’ (79). She goes further, stating that this ‘conceals how the “stranger” comes into being through the marking out of inhabitable spaces, bodies and terrains of knowledge’ (79). Manifestly, this view helps move beyond the mainstream us and them demarcation lines towards a more nuanced understanding of identities forged through movement. Quoting Ian Chambers, Ahmed reflects on migrants ‘draw[ing] our attention to the urgencies of our time: a presence that questions our present’ (qtd. in Ahmed 2000, 78). For Ahmed, Chambers’ view is important because it talks about the double nature of migrancy: being separated from the homeland (geographically and culturally), and ‘becoming’ a stranger in another land. I find this definition powerful and very close to Vilém Flusser’s description of the migrant condition. Alexander Gerner analysed the Czech-Brazilian philosopher’s views on migration, home, and homelessness in his article on the metaphorology of migrancy, arguing that Flusser’s ‘approach to taking up residence in homelessness is whether one can attain a more conscious notion of home’ (Gerner 2016, 181). Flusser himself inhabited multiple cultural and geographical spheres 7  The Hostile Environment policy was created by the UK Home Office under the former home secretary, Theresa May. It is a set of legislative and administrative procedures and actions launched in 2012, designed to make staying in the UK as difficult as possible for ‘illegal’ immigrants, fostering xenophobia and a culture of fear.

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(Prague-born, Brazilian citizen, Jewish and raised on German culture, later living in France) and looked at migrancy as ‘existential homelessness’ (181). The ‘migrant home’ is not one, but multiple homelands (or none at all). While homelessness might carry negative connotations, in a philosophical sense, and especially in this context, it can also be understood as ‘in-betweenness’ and radical openness by its lack of fixity. For Flusser the migrant is: … both a window and a mirror: natives can see the world through him and, at the same time, they see themselves, if only in a distorted view (qtd. in Gerner 2016, 182)

Both definitions of migration and the figure of the migrant discussed by Ahmed and Flusser signal an encounter with difference, but at the same time enable a close examination of the lives and narratives of both hosts and migrants, allowing for a reflection on both those who arrive and those who reside. In other words, the figure of the ‘stranger’ is constructed not only through displacement and the ruptures of migration experiences, but also as a result of socio-cultural and political labelling by the adopted ‘home’.

From Border to Border: Destabilising Bordering As discussed above, the host society’s treatment of migrancy lays bare systemic issues of ‘othering’ and ‘bordering’. I thus return to Simon Grangeat’s Closed Lands to ask how migrants arrive and transgress multiple demarcations of places and spaces of belonging, or indeed non-belonging? Grangeat shows that walls—both physical and invisible—not only delineate movement, but also establish who does and does not belong. The play is composed of seven chants or poems, but it can also be read as one compact monologue for a single voice. A blend between poetry, reportage and a traveller’s diary, it is an observer’s account of border-making and various stages of migration journeys. It begins with the euphoria prompted by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, quickly moving in space and time to present a string of wall-building endeavours starting at the USAMexico border: In 2006, I am twenty-eight years old. In October 2006, I am twenty-eight years old and

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I watch on my screen President George William Bush promoting his Secure Fence Act. The erection of a barrier along the border between the United States and Mexico (Grangeat 2019, 7)

In tracing the history of walls, the journey continues in Africa, first in the Sahara as a natural border, then along the secure walls erected in Ceuta and Melilla, Spain’s outposts in Morocco. It moves to the ‘wall of water’ in the Mediterranean, the journey ending at the most impassable wall, the complex bureaucracy that is the European Union’s asylum system. Arguably, Grangeat is staging the discourse around migration rather than representing migration or a particular migrant experience. For Grangeat, the focus is no longer on a singular (but topical) migration story focused on a central character, but more holistically the immigration system. The play includes a considerable amount of factual information, from the technical specifications of border technologies to security reports and political statements, allowing for a discursive rather than a narrative-­ driven dramaturgy. Becka McFadden’s direction for LegalAliens Theatre followed this form in that it staged a multimedia performance mixing text, movement and screening to explore migrancy through the security policies that aim to curtail it. As Natasha Tripney observes in her review of the production, ‘Closed Lands sits between performance-lecture and something more expressive and poetic’ (Tripney 2020, n.p.). While there is no formal differentiation in the text between various characters, the play is constantly changing tone, switching between different perspectives, hence evoking different roles and identities. Detecting different characters is difficult as the narratives constantly shift and overlap, showing multiple figures from the complex web of migration journeys. The migrant: You have to go unnoticed. You have to be alert, in the immensity of the Landscape. Watch out for tiny, clandestine movements (2019, 4).

The politician:

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All these human beings bound for illegality. Hungry at home. Tired of corruption. Hunted, threatened Persecuted by governments. Civilian victims of local conflicts. Desperate for a future (2019, 5-6).

The border patrol: Make yourself invisible. Lie in wait. Catch them when they fall. Avoid confrontation (2019, 4).

The police: If you get caught along the way, you will be arrested and you will be judged. You will be judged for “trafficking”. Self-trafficking, since it’s your own body you were illegally carrying from one country to another, but it’s trafficking anyway. Trafficking is a serious violation of human rights (2019, 30)

The immigration officer: You will have to explain. You will have to explain yourself. Tell your story, A story. Any story. You have to be believed. You have to earn your right to asylum (2019, 33).

All these voices are interchangeable and can also be read as the voice of a single migrant, and I will return to the fluidity of the characters when discussing the play’s full production in London. In the early stages of the play’s development, at the stage readings in February 2019, the company seemed to have opted for a version that evoked the four actors walking alongside migrants, giving voice to the experiences of difficult journeys. The staging was informed by the workshops the ensemble carried out with

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recent refugees in Tottenham, London, but the actors also filtered the text through their own experiences of migration to the UK. LegalAliens considers itself as a migrant theatre company, whose practice is informed by their actors’ own migration journeys. Defining themselves as ‘international, migrant, radical’, the company’s ‘work is in direct response to the need for migrant theatre-makers to feel seen and represented’ on the British stage (LegalAliens 2020). In the full production of Closed Lands in March 2020,8 we witness a dramaturgy built on multi-roling, the actors rotating through a variety of characters—migrant, citizen, politician, CEO, VIP and media bot—to the tunes of a Tetris game separating the scenes, played out here as a response to the dehumanising migration policies of the UK. Kerenza Evans argues that: This device starkly emphasises the arbitrariness of the roles we inhabit; our identities come largely from the place in the system we are born into and not our intrinsic worth (Evans 2020, n.p.)

The director of Closed Lands, Becka McFadden further explains in the same interview: Where we stand in that system is an accident of birth and geopolitics. We see this most clearly with the citizen and the migrant—any of us could occupy either of those positions at any time, there’s an element of randomness to it. We want our audiences to see each of the performers in each of those roles, to emphasise that any of us could occupy them, that it’s the position in the system that determines how much privilege and power an archetype holds, not the person (Evans 2020, n.p.)

I have quoted at length from the interview to signal two important aspects highlighted here by the production’s treatment of migrancy. Firstly, migration is by and large a socio-cultural and political construct driven by global inequalities, linking us back to Sara Ahmed’s previously discussed analysis of the migrant figure as stranger, as well as to the open definition of the migrant used by Migrants in Culture. Both definitions stress the role played by host societies and host-country policies in the 8  Cast: Luiana Bonfim (Angola/Portugal), Catharina Conte (Brazil), Daiva Dominyka (Lithuania), Becka McFadden (US/UK), Lara Parmiani (Italy/UK). Direction and dramaturgy: Becka McFadden.

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structural positioning of migrancy, including injustices and discrimination. While the migrant ‘sits at the intersection of many identities, carrying different types of privilege’, they also share similar experiences of displacement (LegalAliens 2020). Secondly, this dramaturgy sets out the production’s ethico-political position and indeed responsibility to address systemic issues of migrant representation. By doing so, the company positions migrant theatre-making as an artistic-political intervention into strategies of bordering going beyond the stage. Playing at the Vaults, located in disused arches under London’s busy Waterloo station—itself a securitised zone and a key point of entry into the heart of the British capital—the performance space was divided into five areas, through which the actors rotated during the running time of fifty minutes. While the roles and players changed, these taped off ‘islands’ remained in place (see Fig. 6.1). At its centre: a stepping machine used by the migrant figure(s)—always on the move, but fixed in space, never relocated, and a large bean bag in the middle of the space—the citizen’s couch completed with a MacBook to watch news and fire out comments.

Fig. 6.1  Closed Lands, Vault Festival, London, March 2020. © LegalAliens Theatre

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The production suspends emotional involvement as it concentrates on the anatomy of borders and the people who temporarily inhabit such hostile no man’s lands. Its language is clinically precise and satirical in equal measure. It lists and fetishises the systems of control and migration management, including advert-style inserts such as: Concertina wire. Barbed wire fitted with thousands of cute little blades Designed to tear clothing. And skin. Concertina wire (Grangeat 2019, 15-16, original emphasis).

Grangeat stresses that Closed Lands is ‘about us behind the wall, … telling the story of how humanity finds itself behind walls’ (Theatre Contemporain 2019, my emphasis). The author was influenced by Wendy Brown’s monograph Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010), where Brown discusses the continuous production of nation-state walls in the time of globalisation and eroded nation-state sovereignty. Her analysis shows that, despite global connectivity and declining threats to nation states, walls are multiplying in numbers across the globe driven by the desire for containment and protection. At the same time, border walls remain porous and hard to control; hence their existence is often symbolic, used to legitimise state power. For Grangeat, the play’s central question is ‘who remains locked in when we build a wall?’ (Theatre Contemporain 2019). Reflecting on Brown, he argues that, as political constructs, walls not only block people from entering, but also trap people already residing inside (Theatre Contemporain 2019). The dramaturgy of the production supports the conceptual framework of insiders versus outsiders, simultaneously being locked in and locked out, in multiple ways: in its spatial composition9, by arranging set elements within the same performance space, with no spatial differentiation between opposite entities (e.g., domestic bean bag versus wall built from shoe boxes). Furthermore, this is highlighted though the fluidity of the performance as the actors criss-cross various roles, playing insiders (e.g. citizens) and outsiders (e.g. migrants) at the same time. They only use a limited number of props such as slippers (citizen’s prop) or a military-like vest (border guard’s prop) to signal the character change. In fact, Closed Lands

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 Set and costume design created by Laura Rouzet.

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presents the migrant as the result of borders and cultural-political bordering. The production of Closed Lands tackles such ‘everyday border-making’ (Kolossov and Scott 2013), by the very presence of migrant voices working against invisibility. I would argue that informal (social and cultural) bordering is destabilised here through the reframing of media images and multilingual references. The video projections10 organically built into the performance allow the theatre-makers to redirect the audience’s attention to reflect on the constructedness of mainstream media representations of migrancy. Similarly, by actively utilising the performers’ multilingual skills (often citing sentences in their first language), the performance makes a tangible attempt at destabilising strangeness and narratives of othering. As I noted earlier, the performers’ personal investment—their histories of migration—is a key aspect of LegalAliens’ theatre-making and promotes a more nuanced narrative of migrancy driven first and foremost by self-representation. As Kolossov and Scott state, ‘The nexus between social and state borders is perhaps most evident in … everyday processes of border-making and local negotiations of political and cultural boundaries’ (Kolossov and Scott 2013, n.p.). Through state symbols, political and media narratives, borders are ‘continually being made’ alongside existing social, economic or cultural power structures. As Kolossov and Scott argue, no borders ‘at the local or state level, or of the visible or the invisible type, [are] without a power component’ (2013, n.p.). In their view, ‘As something contrived by society rather [than] given by nature or natural laws, borders can be broadly defined as categories of difference that create socio-spatial distinctions between places, individuals and groups’ (Kolossov and Scott 2013, n.p.). Besides being a ‘political tool for nationalisation’– as in Donald Trump’s America or Victor Orban’s Hungary in recent years—border-­ making exceeds state or formal systems of bordering. Closed Lands ends with Brexit and the UK funding the building of a concrete barrier in Calais, France: ‘The French state has decided to grow vegetables on its side of the wall’ (Grangeat 2019, 48). We follow the performers cutting up vegetables on makeshift tables put together from shoeboxes, offering them to the audience seated in front of them  (see Fig. 6.2). This is of course a clear reference to migrant seasonal workers predominantly from Eastern Europe—systematically vilified in the rightwing British media—without whom fruits and vegetables would not reach  Light and projection designer Julien Bernard-Grau.

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Fig. 6.2  Closed Lands, Vault Festival, London, March 2020. © LegalAliens Theatre

the UK supermarkets and the consumer. We come full circle. Arguably, the production and the larger project is directly influenced by Brexit. For Lara Parmiani, the company’s actor and artistic director, the changes brought about by Brexit are structural as well as cultural: they affect the legal status of the actors, and firms up a cultural insularity that is potentially limiting migrant representation (see Comerford 2020; Awde 2020). The EU flag installed in the right-hand corner of the performance space reflects the play’s references to the EU’s asylum system, as well as the company’s political position with regards to the UK’s EU membership.11 The production opposes such insularity and ultimately offers a creative space for reflection, recognition and resistance. Staging a play on the hostility and violence of the immigration system can be understood as an act of resistance, especially against the backdrop of continuously volatile political discourse in the UK. As Becka McFadden puts it: ‘here together in the 11  Analysing the UK theatres’ response to Brexit would go beyond the parameters of this book chapter. For a topical exploration of UK theatre’s relationship with migrant and marginalised voices in the context of Brexit, see Bonjana Janković’ article on the UK theatre and the ‘foreign element’ (Janković 2018).

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dark, in the company of strangers, perhaps we can even begin to tear down some of what has built up’ (McFadden 2020, n.p.). Reflecting on theatre’s community aspect of bringing together people who do not necessarily know each other, McFadden makes an important point on the power of theatre in fostering collective recognition.

Conclusion: Repositioning Migrancy Through Theatre So far, I have looked at Migrations: Harbour Europe as an artistic-cultural intervention into public narrative enabling a community of migrant artists, thinkers and creators to open a space for politically active voices against the backdrop of multiple socio-political and cultural adversities in the UK. I have showed that through a combination of performative and cultural creation, such as translation, community workshops and public debates, this particular project aims to engender political responsiveness on and off stage. I have looked at strategies of othering and the figure of the migrant as stranger, arguing for a re-examination of the host society’s position and responsibility when it comes to practices and histories of bordering in the context of migration and displacement. I turned to LegalAliens’ production of Closed Lands to discuss ethico-political dramaturgies of migrant representation and ways to destabilise ‘everyday bordering’ by empowering migrant self-representation. As exemplified by theatres of migration, nurturing self-representation by actively shaping migration narratives is key to political agency. In Refugees, Theatre and Crisis. Performing Global Identities (2012), Alison Jeffers looks at refugee activism as political intervention that is ‘performative in intention and execution’ (82). In her definition: Refugee activists are those refugees who challenge their treatment at the hands of the authorities simultaneously challenging cultural assumptions of refugeeness, namely silence and passivity (83)

Jeffers rightly observes that activist performances take place because refugees—but also migrants with various legal statuses as years of Brexit debate have demonstrated—are denied political agency. As of early 2021, there were 9.3 million first-generation migrants in the UK who were born outside the country, representing fourteen percent of the country’s population. In London the figure of foreign-born migrants was thirty-seven

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percent. Despite the numbers, migrant voices are rarely reflected on the British stages: ‘their representation, visibility and support infrastructure in the theatre industry, the presence of all these is almost nonexistent’ (Migrants in Theatre 2020, 4). Migrations: Harbour Europe have taken up the challenge to address and to re-frame such structural power imbalances and promote a creative-­ structural model that is based on both the participation and representation of migrant theatre-makers (see Sharifi 2017, 373-374). Admittedly, the larger project as well as LegalAliens theatre production discussed in this chapter acted primarily on an aesthetic or artistic level. Its dramaturgical focus on cultivating a more nuanced understanding of migrancy was intended at shaping the audience’s perception. Its activism then stems from the ‘political dimension of the theatre as the creation of space and relationships in order to materially and symbolically re-establish common ground’ (395). This is by challenging the audience to re-think and re-­ evaluate categories of otherness and positions of privilege and power when dealing with migrancy. Self-representation is key in repositioning migrancy as a structural component of contemporary societies. How can migrant theatre move beyond singular performance interventions and towards institutional practices of recognition and inclusion? Drawing on ‘postmigrant’ theatre perspectives emerging from German-­ speaking Europe, Pieter Verstraete stresses the importance of the migrant artist ‘who brings in an alternative perspective on the “Leitkultur” (the mainstream culture, or what is regarded as “common-place”), … as well as on the national theatre infrastructure’ attempting to reposition migrancy and migrant theatre-makers within existing cultural structures (Verstraete 2015, n.p.). For this to happen, Anika Marschall notes that artistic responses to contemporary migration movements and asylum policy can only be effective when rooted in and working with institutions and various societal stakeholders (Marschall 2018, 148).

The emergence of the Migrants in Theatre movement in mid-2020 makes structural and institutional shifts rather more tangible. Initiated by LegalAliens Theatre among a core membership of around thirty migrant-­ led theatre companies and migrant theatre-makers, the core objective of the MIT is to address issues of representation in UK theatre and increasing the presence of migrant artists in publicly funded performing arts institutions throughout the country. Their manifesto, the result of preliminary

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online surveys, monthly digital meetings and townhall forums with key regional venues across the UK, has produced a set of 15 action points. Calling on theatre institutions to act in three key areas, the manifesto demands structural change with regards to prejudices and the status of migrant artists, programming and commissioning, as well as representation and casting practices (Migrant in Theatre 2020, 11-13). Integrating migrant perspectives, and indeed the migrant artists in a more inclusive UK theatre ecology would result in artistic and institutional practices with plurality and multi-perspectivity at their core. Whilst the potential for such radical structural change is questionable in a post-Brexit political climate, it nonetheless signals a real desire from migrant theatre-makers in the UK to reimagine a British theatrical culture that is transnational, inclusive and practices solidarity. The artistic practices, activism and collective actions that emerge from migrant performances today foster a rethinking of host-guest relationships, and this vision might prove to be essential in reducing socio-cultural asymmetries particularly in any post-Covid cultural recovery in and beyond the UK.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge. Arendt, Hannah. 1994 [1943]. We Refugees. In Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, ed. Marc Robinson, 110–119. Faber and Faber. Awde, Nick. 2020. “Where are the European migrants in the UK theatre scene?” The Stage. 11 February 2020. Accessed 26 January 2021. https://www.thestage. co.uk/features/where-­are-­the-­european-­migrants-­in-­the-­uks-­theatre-­scene. Balfour, Michael. 2013. Refugee Performance: Practical Encounters. Intellect. Carpani, Roberta, and Giulia I. Malini, eds. 2019. Playing Inclusion: the performing arts in the time of migrations. Comunicazioni Sociali 1: 3–20. Comerford, Ruth. 2020. “LegalAliens’ Lara Parmiani: ‘We want to get a different perspective on migration.’” The Stage. 24 February 2020. Accessed 5 February 2021. https://www.thestage.co.uk/features/legalaliens-­lara-­parmiani-­we-­ want-­to-­get-­a-­different-­perspective-­on-­migration. Cox, Emma. 2014. Theatre and Migration. Palgrave Macmillan. Cox, Emma, and Caroline Wake, eds. 2018. Envisioning Asylum/Engendering Crisis. Research in Drama Education 23 (2): 137–147. El-Tayeb, Fatima. 2011. European Others. Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. University of Minnesota Press.

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Gerner, Alexander. 2016. Posfacio / Afterword. Five Philosophical Notes on “Migration” and its Metaphorology. In Migración/Migration, ed. Daniel Lanero Táboas, 169–192. Mateus Doc XI. Grangeat, Simon. 2011. Terres Closes. Unpublished play. ———. 2019. Closed Lands, Trans. Laure Fernandez and LegalAliens. Unpublished play. Hill, Marc, and Erol Yildiz, eds. 2018. Postmigrantische Visionen. Transcript Verlag. Janković, Bojana. 2018. Brexit Brexit Brexit Brexit Brexit Brexit Brexit Brexit Brexit: UK Theatre and the Foreign Element. Critical Stages 17 (June): 1. http://www.critical-­stages.org/17/brexit-­brexit-­brexit/. Jeffers, Alison. 2012. Refugees. Theatre and Crisis. Performing Global Identities: Palgrave Macmillan. Kolossov, Vladimir and James Scott. 2013. “Selected conceptual issues in border studies.” Belgeo. 31 October 2013. Accessed 26 January 2021. http://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/10532. LegalAliens Theatre. 2020. About us. Accessed 26 January 2021. https://www. legalalienstheatre.com/about/. Marschall, Anika. 2018. What can theatre do about the refugee crisis? Enacting commitment and navigating complicity in performative interventions. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23 (2): 148–166. McFadden, Becka. 2020. “Director’s Note.” Closed Lands Programme Booklet. 1 March 2020. McIvor, Charlotte. 2016. Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland: Towards A New Interculturalism. Palgrave Macmillan. Meerzon, Yana. 2012. Performing Exile, Performing Self. Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2020. Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism. Palgrave Macmillan. Meerzon, Yana, and Katharina Pewny, eds. 2019. Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre. Routledge. Migrants in Culture. 2020. A Culture Sector Recovery for Migrants. Accessed 12 October 2020. http://www.migrantsinculture.com/culture-­sector-­recovery-­ for-­migrants/. ———. 2021. Who we are. Accessed 30 June 2021. http://migrantsinculture.com/. Migrants in Theatre. 2020. Creating a Thriving Environment for Migrant Theatre Artists in the UK. Accessed 20 January 2021. https://drive.google.com/file/ d/1cGOfWQPvv4BQ13gKT1p-­a1YjAddV37Cx/view. Musca, Szabolcs. 2019. Crisis in the Making: Public Theatre, Migration and Activist Aesthetics. Comunicazioni Sociali 1: 42–51. Sharifi, Azadeh. 2017. Theatre and Migration. Documentation, Influences and Perspectives in European Theatre. In Independent Theatre in Contemporary Europe, ed. Manfred Brauneck, 321–416. Transcript Verlag.

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Skeiker, Fadi. 2021. Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories. Routledge. Theatre Contemporain. 2019. “‘Terres closes’ présentation par Simon Grangeat.” 26 September 2019. Accessed 10 March 2020. https://www.theatre-­ contemporain.net/textes/59ca32e0051a2/playlist/id/A-­propos-­de-­Terres-­ closes-­presentation-­par/playlist/A-­propos-­de-­Terres-­closes-­presentation-­par. Tripney, Natasha. 2020. “Closed Lands.” The Stage. 10 March 2020. Accessed 26 January 2021. https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/closed-­lands-­review-­ at-­the-­vaults-­london%2D%2Dlayered-­piece-­about-­migrants-­and-­borders Verstraete, Pieter. 2015. “Cross-Cultural Theatre around the World: Looking for Transnational Migration Studies between Europe and the U.S.” Unpublished conference paper. Accessed 31 March 2020. https://www.academia. edu/35723539/Cross_Cultural_Theatre_around_the_World_Looking_for_ Transnational_Migration_Studies_between_Europe_and_the_U_S Wilmer, Stephen. 2018. Performing Statelessness in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 7

On the Necropolitics of Contemporary Human Uprootedness: Ecocentric Empathy in Documentary Film and Philosophy Graça P. Corrêa

Introduction In The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind, Simone Weil (2002 [1949]) argued that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul,” though one of the hardest to define: A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.... Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part. (40)

G. P. Corrêa (*) Center for Philosophy of Sciences (CFCUL), University of Lisbon, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Classon Frangos, S. Ghose (eds.), Refugee Genres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2_7

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A passionate advocate of the oppressed, especially “those oppressed by the anonymous forces of modern society” (xii), Weil viewed uprootedness as a condition where people lack deep living connections to their environment and community life. It is by being grounded and rooted in the environment that human beings draw their bodily-mental, ethical and spiritual energies. Weil thus assumed a phenomenological perspective similar to that of Merleau-Ponty (1962), “of space as existential, just as our existence is spatial” (293-94). Although Weil’s notion of uprootedness refers to “the life of a community,” in this chapter I seek to expand upon her concept through the lens of ecocriticism so as to recognize the contemporary plight of refugees as a comprehensive ecological problem—of Earth, of living space and of affective relations. In effect, as French philosopher Félix Guattari pointed out, we urgently need to connect environmental ecology (i.e., the normative sense of ecology) to social ecology (the life of human community). Accordingly, ecocentric empathy involves an embodied resonance not only with the environment but also with other human and non-human beings; it entails a sense of responsibility “for the future of all life on the planet, for animal and vegetable species, likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts, cinema” (Guattari 1995, 120). An ecocentric (non-anthropocentric) concept of ecology does not pertain to the extra-­ human environment, but rather to the earth as a whole, including social relations among human beings. Derived from the ancient Greek notion of “feeling-into,” the concept of empathy was endorsed by Romantic theory and aesthetics as a pantheistic and synesthetic mode of cognition, through feeling oneself into art, nature and human relations. Empathy is immanently an ecocritical experience involving an embodied resonance, or a “transposing” process, whereby we try to imagine ourselves in the position of the other: be it extra-human, non-human and human. In the latter case, empathy is as much about self-care as caring for others. Countering the idea that the object of empathy is other less fortunate beings, there is an inescapable relationship between care for the self and care for other people, between personal transformation and the upholding of general human rights (Corrêa 2019). Given that “ecology” stems from the Greek word oikos, which stands for house or dwelling place, uprootedness seems more often than not counterecological, for it implies losing one’s refuge and sense of belonging. Such a close connection, between our intimate dwelling space and the wider

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haven of our earthly environment, suggests that diverse and well-­balanced systems of relations of living beings with the earth must be sought at the macrocosmic and microcosmic scales. At both scales, a living relationship with one’s oikos is not just a matter of functional and utilitarian relations, but rather an ecocentric affective bond with a sanctuary that protects and connects us, and which is invested with our imagination. A functional and utilitarian relation between humans and their oikos, rather than an affective-empathetic one, has chiefly characterized our current anthropocentric age. In contrast to an ascription of accountability to a One Human or abstract anthropos in charge, however, philosopher Bruno Latour (2017a) imputes responsibility for ecological unsustainability, environmental depletion and climate transformation to “localized networks of some individual bodies,” thus offering “a swift way to ascribe responsibility to those to whom it belongs” (40). Consequently, and following Jason W. Moore’s suggestion (2016), he proposes to designate our period of geohistory as the capitalocene. Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist Achille Mbembe coined the term necropolitics to refer to the economic and political management of human populations through exposing them directly and indirectly to death (2019, 92). According to Mbembe, masses of individuals are constantly exposed to death through wars, genocides, refugee “crises,” ecocides, pandemics, as well as processes of pauperization and precarization. Necropolitics is a radicalization of philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, whereby power is exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, thus turning into a biopolitical power that administers, optimizes, and multiplies human life, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations, but also condemning entire populations and human bodies to a condition of superfluousness. Within this process of mass dehumanization, human beings are converted, like everything else, into raw materials for consumption, “manipulated, managed and destined to technological production and destruction,” and can be can be put to death by anyone, because their death does not imply any crime whatsoever (Duarte 2005, 11). Moreover, they are constantly being uprooted from their land and communities, from their social and natural environment, from their affective-empathetic relations. According to Mbembe (2019), current day necropolitical practices effectively continue the practices of colonization and slavery, for they similarly entail the “subjugation of life to the power of death,” whilst engaging in wars of natural wealth extraction and human predation (92). We now

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experience new forms of social existence in which vast populations live at the edge of life, or are subjugated to extreme conditions that turn them into “living-dead” creatures (39-40). In such a context, the camp has become a structural feature of our globalized condition: It has ceased to scandalize. Better still, the camp is not just our present. It is our future: our solution for keeping away what disturbs, for containing or rejecting all excess, whether it is human, organic matter or industrial waste. In short, it is a form of government of the world (60).

The camp-form includes refugee camps, prisons, banlieues, suburbs and favelas, which have become a prevailing way of governing unwanted populations enclosed in precarious spaces. Hence, necropolitics manufactures a mass of populations that live under severe precariousness and, as such, can be easily exploited and eliminated. Because my reflection focuses on the necropolitical and ecocritical aspects of contemporary human uprootedness in works of documentary film, I am deliberately moving away from over-particular categorizations of migrants and refugees.1 Expanding upon the UN definition of refugee—of a person who has a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion” (UNHCR 1951, 6)—this chapter reflects upon humans that have been displaced by war and by climate change, as well as upon those experiencing “the ’persecuting’ force of global capitalism and the forms of ’slow violence’ that routinely render certain places uninhabitable” (Cox et al. 2020, 9). Correspondingly, it examines select documentary films that approach contemporary human uprootedness due to different causes: starting with war refugees in Daphne Matziaraki’s 4.1 miles (2016), progressing to natural disaster refugees in Michael Nash’s Climate Refugees (2010), then to those displaced by unsustainable 1  As recently pointed out, there are few more challenging questions for migration scholars and policy-makers than how to draw the line between migrants and refugees, or between voluntary and forced migration (Crawley and Skleparis 2018). Although it is manifestly hard to differentiate among economic and political causes for migration, they are often formally divided into economic migration and forced migration, with the latter split into coercive migration (such as slave trade, deportation, mass evictions) and reactive migration (due to unemployment, war, unsustainable development or environmental degradation). Additionally, the IOM (2014) distinguishes among Environmental Migrants, Environmentally Displaced Persons, and Development-forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR). Graça P. Corrêa’s research is supported by national funds through FCT Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., Portugal, under DL57/2016/CP1479/CT0074, as a researcher of FCUL/DHFC/CFCUL, UIDB/00678/2020.

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development in Kalyanee Mam’s Lost World (2018), to finally approach more expansive sources of human spatial-temporal distress and biospheric crisis in Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Powaqqatsi (1988). As Agnes Woolley (2020) remarks, the documentary film genre unavoidably raises ethical questions, especially when it implies recording vulnerable groups such as displaced or uprooted humans, hence shaping our public perception of them in a meaningful way. Existing at the intersection of fact and narrative fiction, documentary films are well placed to deal with the complexities of the movement and lives of refugees because they are “concerned both with revealing truth and examining how that truth is mediated through narrative forms” (149-50). The documentary films examined in this chapter work within dissimilar aesthetic and ethical modes, differing in the way they mediate their storytelling. Although Matziaraki’s film approaches the “reality effect” of cinema vérité, it deploys a meta-theatricality by making explicit the director as camera operator, thus acknowledging how documentary films are also aesthetic acts. Both Nash’s and Mam’s films may be considered what Bill Nichols (2016) designates as “self-reflexive documentaries”—which mix observational passages with titles and comments by the filmmaker and/or interviewees—therefore making clear that they are forms of “re-­presentation” and cinematic discourse, rather than neutral windows onto reality. As for Godfrey Reggio’s films, they significantly belong to the poetic mode of the documentary genre. As noted by Mark Terry, “the time distortion techniques of slow motion and time-lapse, the lack of conventional editing, the absence of narration or subject interviews, all combine to impose an altogether different viewing experience engineered to “retrain our perception” (2020, 93). Not only do Reggio’s films present the intrinsic connection between humans and their natural habitats, but they also evoke through image and sound the destructive processes threatening our biosphere. In the process of examining a few examples of the documentary film genre on human uprootedness from an ecocritical perspective, I investigate the ways their aesthetic and ethical modes may help promote pro-­ social action by enabling affective empathy and attention, in individual viewers, towards the plight of uprooted human beings. By drawing from ecocritical philosophy and film, my aim is to expand the research field of migrant and refugee studies, thus contributing towards a much-needed connection between the current migrant predicament and the lack of a bioregional ecocentric management of the earth.

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War Refugees in Daphne Matziaraki’s 4.1 miles (2016) Many of the several thousands of refugees who landed on the Greek islands since 2015 have been lodged in the overcrowded camps of Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Kos and Leros, where they live in appalling conditions, awaiting authorizations, for ten or more months, to be relocated in another European country. The Greek camps accommodate the larger number of refugees in the European Union, making Greece face enormous social and economic problems in order to manage mass migration flows at the EU’s external borders, in spite of its own financial crisis. In many of these camps, such as in Moria  (destroyed by fire in 2020), children and adolescents often practice self-mutilation and try to commit suicide, confessing their desire to die (BBC 2019). Whereas in 2015 most refugees came from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, in recent years thousands are sailing from Tunisia, Libya, Algeria and Morocco, many proceeding from both West and East African countries (Guinea, Mali, Ivory Coast, Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea). Meanwhile, both Italy and Malta have prevented boats carrying migrants from docking in their ports. Although daily rescues of refugees in Greece are no longer a main feature in international news, they have not ceased. Just now, as I write, a Greek coast guard vessel managed to rescue twenty-five migrants who were floating in the sea, including one already dead; three others are missing (Vatican News 2021). Quite evidently, not all of these refugees are fleeing war; many are desperately trying to escape poverty, homelessness and hunger. 4.1 miles is a short documentary directed, produced, photographed and edited by filmmaker and journalist Daphne Matziaraki. Through her hand-held camera, she takes us aboard a boat of the Greek Coast Guard, as its captain and his men are rescuing refugees from the war in Syria off the island of Lesbos, in a stretch of 4.1 miles of sea that separates Turkey from Greece. All the rescues of 4.1 Miles were shot on a single day: October 28, 2015. As we now know, during this year alone nearly 500,000 refugees entered Greece, most by crossing the Mediterranean waters on overcrowded tiny boats and inflatable rafts, abandoned to their fate by traffickers. Oftentimes these boats were overturned or torn away, casting all the passengers into the water and leading to thousands of deaths by drowning. The deadliest month of these crossings until today was April 2015, when approximately 1,500 people lost their lives.

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But these may just appear as spreadsheet numbers. Experiencing Matziaraki’s 4.1 miles is of much greater import, for we are directly confronted with the actual suffering of individuals, with their real faces and presences. Operating the camera, Matziaraki is at the helm besides Kyriakos Papadopoulos, the Coast Guard captain, as he orders his men to get ropes ready; likewise, she is on the deck as bodies are eagerly lifted aboard. Oftentimes we sense that she unpredictably lets the camera rest in order to anxiously help the coast guards. Because of the unsteady and jerky movements of the hand-held camera, our view oscillates with the waves and we get a real sense of the violence of the sea, like a ruthless and tragic divine force, maddened and unleashed against the fragile bodies of humans. In the words of the director, It was very hard for me to be there—it was really hard for me to film there and hold a camera. It was really hard for me to try to separate the job that I had to do, which I had decided that I needed to do, which was to make this film to show what is happening there, and to hold it together. The film opens with a scene where the Coast Guard captain tells me to put the camera down and hold a baby. (Grobar 2016)

As a reviewer notes, “although we’ve all grown familiar with these scenes in nightly news broadcasts, director Daphne Matziaraki succeeds in making them feel raw again” (Kermode 2017). Close-up shots of children’s faces: bewildered, shocked, afraid, in agony. Rescued adults hanging tightly to each other, clasped in the boat’s deck and screaming because their travelling companions are still down in the sea, maybe lost forever, snatched away by the waves. As soon as the boat reaches the coast, the islanders gather around the refugees, compelled to help and therefore improvise ways of assisting them. An elderly man holds a naked baby by the feet and persistently slaps her back to get water out of her lungs. Others hurriedly fetch blankets, wrapping them around the strangers. Captain Kyriakos emerges as a particularly empathetic human being: if it were not for him or others like him, these refugees would certainly die.2 As a reviewer observes,

2  Having rescued over 5,000 people from the Aegean Sea, he prematurely died in 2018, of a heart attack. See National News 2018.

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What’s really new in this film is its focus on the individuals charged by fate and conscience with taking on this impossible task.... Pushed beyond the point of exhaustion, they work because they see no other choice. There is nobody else (Kermode 2017).

We are led to feel these rescuers’ ethical sense of responsibility for their fellow humans, their unavoidable sorrow at not being able to save every life, their haunting uncertainty at having unwillingly left someone behind, unattended and doomed to die in the massive overpowering sea. Instead of merely raising a reflexive awareness, the attentiveness that 4.1 Miles prompts—perhaps due to its brevity, absence of voice-over or dialogue, and scarce ambient music—adheres to a mode of perception that fosters an ethics of care. As ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood (2002) suggests, attention with regard to the “other” whom we have become accustomed to relegate to the background or to the margins of our sensitive field, condemning it to the condition of object, product or resource, is in itself a political gesture (169).

Environmental Refugees in Michael Nash’s Climate Refugees (2010) Although contested by certain academics (Selby et  al. 2017), there are several studies that connect climate change with the civil war in Syria, as well as with the 2003/05 wars in Darfur (Mazo 2010; De Châtel 2014; Malm 2016). Drawing causal links between environmental degradation and armed conflict does not in any way misrepresent the political and economic causes of these conflicts, but rather leads towards an ecocritical and necropolitical understanding of present-day refugeedom. Adding to the competition over natural resources, a mounting population growth and a changing climate that contributes to drought and depleted lands, rural populations tend to migrate to cities in large numbers. Subsequently, due to a high rate of unemployment, lack of affordable housing and food, many human beings are forced to flee to other countries through illegal means, often risking their lives because they are unable to migrate otherwise. As Mbembe remarks, we live in a world “characterized more than ever by an unequal redistribution of capacities for mobility, and in which the only chance of survival, for many, is to move and to keep on moving” (3).

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The official concept of “climate refugees” first emerged in a report by UNGA in 2009, when the then Secretary General of the United Nations advocated a new refugee legal status for people fleeing climate change. In 2010, The UNFCCC-United Nations on Climate Change issued a program aimed at helping climate-induced migrants; and in 2011 the United Nations Security Council considered climate change a threat to the national security of countries undergoing climate stress. Although the term “climate refugees” is often used in relation to forced migration due to climate and environmental change, it is not a legally valid term, given that the 1951 Refugee Convention does not recognize environmental factors as criteria to define a refugee (IOM 2020). In a documentary film entitled Climate Refugees, director and producer Michael P. Nash explores the impact of a changing climate on shortages of food and water, housing devastation, floods, droughts, sea level rise, civil unrest, climate wars, demonstrating how it is already leading to a massive global surge of human refugees. In effect, according to the IOM-­ International Organization for Migration, 18.8 million people became homeless in 2017 alone, due to environmental disasters, one a half times more than due to armed conflicts; and 143 million people worldwide are estimated to be driven away from their homes in the next three decades due to climate change (IOM 2020). Seeking to defy the politicization of climate change in the US, and thus achieve a bipartisan consensus, in his documentary Nash interviews politicians, high-ranking military and specialists from diverse points of the political spectrum: Senator John Kerry, former Congressman Newt Gingrich, Vice Admiral Lee F. Gunn, Stephen Schneider, Yvo de Boer, Lester Brown, Tino Cuellar and a few others. Approximating a conventional TV documentary, the film alternates among such interviews, landscape shots from different parts of the world with narrative voice-over by Nash, and short scenes illustrating victims suffering from recent climate disasters, who often express through tears how they lost their homes and loved ones. Nash’s film evidently seeks to evoke sympathy and awareness towards climate change victims and refugees. However, due to the interviews he conducts with politicians and military leaders who above all stress the security threats of mass displacement, his film leads us to envisage refugees as a potential source of social violence and global chaos. As reviewers of the film have pointed out, the climate specialists, military leaders and politicians being interviewed by Nash are predominantly Western males from Europe and the US, and there is a stark difference between the portrayal

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of the experts and that of the film’s “victims,” most of them afflicted women, old men and children. This disparity is underlined when a little boy from Bangladesh asks Nash when will the “Americans” send help to his country. As for climate refugees, they are presented either as victims or as a terrorist threat to First World countries. According to Angela Oels (2016), the climate refugee is a “discursive construct” in a much contested narrative on climate change. It is part of a “discourse that constructs ’millions of climate refugees’ as a threat to states’ national security,” so as to mobilize defense (e.g., huge investment in border technologies) against the presumed threat. It also construes climate change as a menace to the human security of people in developing countries, summoning industrialized countries to save climate refugees and protect people, in line with Foucault’s biopolitics, or through a system whereby host states are endowed with power to exercise total control over the lives and deaths of migrants. Oels further notes that such discourses on climate refugees do not lead to carbon emission reductions, but rather “contribute to legitimizing the displacement of millions of people,” as well as depoliticize the issue of climate change in a radical way (189). Nevertheless, I suggest that Nash’s film contributes with helpful information on the topic of environmental refugees, especially when it explores the conflict between national sovereignty and the freedom of movement that should be granted to human beings. We also get a sense of the absurd amount of money spent on protecting borders, as well as of the colossal bureaucracy involved in dealing with asylum applications. As Yvo de Boer, former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, remarks in the film: “What worries me about this process is that it’s all about people in suits in conference centers talking about a global policy response and the human face of it isn’t evident in those negotiations.” Similar to conventional documentary films on ecological disasters, Nash’s work tends towards flawed generalizations. The film opens with an outer space view of planet earth; at a later moment, we are presented with an image of the globe with red arrows erupting from the world’s poorer countries, all converging into Europe and the US. Arguing that climate change represents “a last call for humanity,” Nash’s voice-over asserts that “whatever difference in color, in language, we are one,” and thus, “the challenge now is not to save the planet but to save civilization itself.” Close to the end, the film delegates the solutions to the problem of

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climate change to individual consumers, when it shallowly urges us to use energy-saving light bulbs and recycle household waste in order to counter global warming. As philosopher Latour argues (2018), the often used image of the “blue planet” as seen from space—i.e., where the camera is actually off-­ planet—is already a sign of seeing the earth from without, from the vantage point of the universe, as a Galilean object, instead of sensing it from within, as inhabiting us, because we feel ourselves earthbound (67-70). By appealing to the whole of humanity to stop global warming and thus help climate refugees, Nash’s film proceeds from an anthropogenic universal perspective of humanity that must be challenged, not only because this unitary view is a construct, but moreover because it fails to account for the responsibility attributable to actual agents. In effect, speaking of the “anthropic origin” of global warming is meaningless, given that many people are not responsible in any way for these actions on the geological scale. As Latour notes (2017a), “Amazonian Indians, Alaskan seal hunters, Shanghai tycoons, Enron executives and slum dwellers of Valparaiso could not be ascribed the same responsibility in this newly defined ’geological force’” (39). Whether or not the change in climate observed in the last decades is due to “natural” cycles or to “man-made” causes, the emphasis of Nash’s film is always on carbon emissions and never on the capitalogenic crimes of unrestricted economic growth and unsustainable development that are leading to ecological devastation. Governments and corporations are the driving forces of a form of development that places profit and growth before the survival and health of society, and which is driving us to a precipice. It is imperative, I argue, that we cease talking of a transition to a low carbon economy as the main solution to our ecological problems, whilst ignoring several other damaging effects the capitalocene has caused on the environment—such as the ocean’s plasticization and acidification, the messy unsustainable urban transformation of rural lands, mass tourism, depletion of resources through mining (including of precious metals for “green” digital technologies), deforestation, industrial agriculture’s use of antibiotics and chemical fertilizers, overfishing, subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, and the “win-win” business models of globalization, whereby people in First World countries are able to buy cheap goods because of illegal or outsourced underpaid workers.

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Developmental Refugees in Kalyanee Mam’s Lost World (2018) Since 1951, the UN Refugee Convention only assigns a legal status to people fleeing from a violent regime or armed conflict, or who have a well-­ founded fear of being persecuted because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion and membership to a particular social group. Perhaps for this reason, since 2014 there has been some perplexity in the residents of OECD countries upon perceiving, through newscasts, the masses of people risking their lives to migrate from Asian, Middle Eastern and African countries, when apparently there was no direct exposure to persecution, social violence or armed conflicts. Undeniably, present-day refugees result not only from wars, dictatorial regimes, and climate change, but also due to particular forms of regional and global development. Kalyanee Mam’s short documentary film, Lost World, portrays a woman’s relationship to her beloved landscape, which is on the brink of erasure. The film opens with a shot of giant excavators dredging massive quantities of sand from under the water of a river, and depositing it in barges. A text indicates that this sand is being taken off the Cambodian island of Koh Sralau to be carried to Singapore, in order to allow for the expansion of its landmass; it further informs us that since 2007, nearly 80 million tons of sand have been mined and exported to Singapore from the rivers in Cambodia. Throughout the film, we follow Phalla Vy, a young Cambodian woman whose family and community live off catching fish, crabs, and shrimp from the river. Sand mining “economic activities” are thus not only threatening a communal way of life but also an entire ecosystem, leading to the erosion of coastal areas, widening of riverbeds, disappearance of entire islands, extinction of wildlife and destruction of mangrove forests. As Latour (2020a) observes, “Economy, the science of managing limited resources, has become an argument for forgetting all limits” (13). Globalization has bluntly accelerated a process of economic and territorial imperialism whereby wildlife sanctuaries, vast expanses of forests, agricultural lands and public spaces are being invaded, exploited and destroyed by private corporations and state companies, to the point of extinguishing animal and plant species, causing unhinged environmental degradation, and evicting “superfluous” people from their living environments, turning them into potential and actual refugees.

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Kalyanee Mam’s Lost World depicts an ecocide, or the deliberate destruction of a natural environment. According to a report by the IUCN-­ International Union for Conservation of Nature (2017), global private companies were sub-contracted by the government to export the sand to Singapore; in the meantime, sand mining in Cambodia “has caused river banks to collapse, destroyed fish habitats, resulting in a reduction of 70—90% in fish catches.” In the village of Koh Sralau alone, sand dredging has devastated the ecosystem that thousands of families depend upon for their livelihood, contributing to collective poverty and displacement. Although a temporary ban was imposed in 2017, environmental groups claim that sand mining has continued, since “dredgers have been flouting laws and refusing to take heed of the locals’ objections” (Coconuts Singapore 2016). Most shockingly, I maintain, miners have been licensed to dig for sand in areas of mangrove forests that are protected under the Unesco Ramsar International Treaty, meant to preserve the world’s wetlands. Through aerial footage and hand-held camera shots that follow Phalla Vy and her children toiling in the forest, Mam’s film immerses us in the emerald radiance and white sand of the river, making us marvel at the natural beauty of its landscape. Quite evidently, the director had the empathy and enthusiasm to gain familiarity and trust from her main subject, whose intense look and repressed indignation is so apparent in the film’s close-ups of her face. As a commentator notes, “Normally when we think of refugees, we think of people who have lost their homeland by being forced to leave it. In the case of Phalla Vy, it is her land that has been forced away—literally” (Mountain Film 2019). The film makes us take on Phalla Vy’s perspective when she visits Singapore’s landmarks, built over the sand taken from her beloved river, and expresses a combination of awe, shock and horror. Through her gaze we get a view of the iconic Marina Bay Sands, a 55-story hotel, resort, and casino valued at $6.6 billion; afterward we follow her into the interior of “Gardens by the Bay,” a billion-dollar garden theme park built on top of 250 acres of reclaimed land. All of these gigantic constructions were erected for commercial, leisure and entertainment purposes. The development boasts of the longest infinity pool in the world, the world’s largest man-made mountain and indoor water fall, the world’s second largest Ferris wheel, of its eighteen Supertrees made of steel, of capturing “the natural beauty present in our world in two single-layer dome conservatories,” of being “a dream destination for all shopaholics,” and of “giving

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visitors the perfect opportunity to take photographs.” Effectively, as Phalla Vy walks through the greenhouses, touching and smelling the plants, most visitors are just taking photos of themselves. At the top of the “man-made mountain” she reaches for a plant and cries out, “it’s plastic!” Oddly, Gardens by the Bay claims that its parks were conceived on “the principles of environmental sustainability” and seek to teach its visitors “about rare plants and their fast-disappearing environment.” Built on an ecocidal foundation, this development claims to uphold green energy and to teach concepts of environmental sustainability. Lost World reveals two competing narratives about humans’ relationship to their natural environment: one that ecocentrically views the land as a sacred source of life to be revered and protected, and another that treats the land as an endlessly renewable cheap resource to profit from and exploit, turning the earth into a theme park or a mere passive object for humankind’s interventions. The film similarly expands our conception of “environment” to include virtual and synthetic environments. As Mbembe (2019) notes, “The advent of the plastic human and its corollary, the digital subject,” has led to the emergence of new ways of conceiving space, thoroughly shaking up our phenomenological experiences of the world (13, 102). As a capitalogenic transformation of landscape is now extending to the whole world, “its gradual artificialization is making the notion of ’nature’ as obsolete as that of ’wilderness’” (Latour 2017b, 120-121). By the end of Lost World we return to the island of Koh Sralau, where the multiple dredging barges and cranes carry on their tireless work. Sitting alone on the deck of her boat, Phalla Vy ponders: “When you feel troubled you’re like an island, I have hope this island will always remain.” The contrast could not be deeper, between her individual sentient feelings towards the landscape she inhabits, and which in turn inhabits her, and the anonymous mass of tourists in Singapore, immersed in the hollowness of a culture of distraction. As Latour remarks, “it would actually be a fairly good definition of ’modern’ people to say that they live off a land that they don’t inhabit” (Latour 2020a, 13). Lost World is eminently about uprootedness, as we witness the actual snatching away of the soil that provides nourishment and support for the roots of humans, animals and mangrove forests. The film thus raises serious questions about our capitalogenic mode of global economic development, on the apartheid and extreme inequality that it generates, and on its devastating ecological consequences that ultimately make the earth uninhabitable for a growing number of people.

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Human Uprootedness in Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Powaqqatsi (1988) In 1993, anthropologist Thayer Scudder devised the notion of development-­induced refugees, in order to convey the disastrous social effects of large dams in Africa. According to Rob Nixon (2011), “developmental refugees” are forced to flee from their homelands not for political persecutions, but rather due to development projects drawn by the “violent geographies of fast capitalism”: The ’developmental refugee’ is a poignantly paradoxical figure. Development implies positive growth, ascent toward a desirable end; refugee implies flight from a grave threat—in this case, the threat of development-inflicted destitution. (152)

As global history accelerates, people from so-called “developing” nations find themselves severed from environments that had provided ancestral sustenance, becoming dispossessed not only from their living space, but also stranded in time. They are modernity’s surplus people, carried away from a historical world to something approaching a nonworld. Thus, developmental violence needs to be seen as a contest not only over space, bodies, labor, resources, but also over time (7-8). As Weil (2002 [1949]) remarks, “The past once destroyed never returns. The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes” (48). In The Need for Roots, Weil connects the condition of uprootedness to the mounting industrialization of society and to processes of pauperization and precarization that lead to people feeling trapped in high stress low paying jobs, thus causing a spiritual estrangement between human beings and their labor (294). People who are thus uprooted “fall into a spiritual lethargy resembling death, like the majority of the slaves in the days of the Roman Empire,” into a state of apathetic stupor that makes them feel “at war with society” (44, 46). In this respect, I want to briefly discuss two films from the 1980s, written and directed by Godfrey Reggio, namely Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Powaqqatsi (1988). Both of these films have the word qatsi in their titles, which in the Native American Hopi language means “life.” Whereas Koyaanisqatsi denotes foolish life, life in turmoil or out of balance, Powaqqatsi indicates a mode of existence that consumes the life forces of others in order to further its own. Accordingly, the first film (recorded mostly in the US) is critical of the increasingly

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accelerated, though spiritually hollow, human way of life in so-called “developed” countries; and the latter (filmed primarily in Brazil, Hong Kong, Nepal, Peru and Kenya) is celebratory of the diversity of the earth’s landscapes and social customs, but revealing of how capitalogenic development is having a deadly impact upon entire ecosystems, including small-­ scale cultures. Powaqqatsi opens with a vast wide-angle view of hundreds of gold miners working up and down the near-vertical walls of a mountain, their muddied bodies carrying large sacks of dirt up and down the hill, and appearing so small that they are hardly discernible as humans, rather resembling insects. At some point the camera zooms in to show a few hands carrying the inanimate body of a laborer, who apparently suffered from a sudden stroke or injury, or perhaps is already dead from exhaustion. This violent image of the exploration of third-world labor strikingly contrasts with the serenity and calm beauty of the next film sequence, when we see African women carrying huge bundles on their heads as they walk slowly and gracefully through the early-morning mist. A similar contrast is apparent in Koyaanisqatsi, which shifts between highly kinetic time-lapse photography of urban scenes, exhibiting massive automobile traffic, incessant pedestrian circulation, and a maddening switching of lights, on and off, in high rise buildings; and the aerial shots of breathtaking peaceful landscapes, both unchanged by and unrelated to human beings. Although these two feature-length films do not supply information about any issues through data diagrams, texts or narration, they strikingly reveal the ecological imbalance, necropolitical rule and capitalogenic development that are currently triggering human uprootedness. Through striking imagery, the films disclose how a monocultural mode of development envisions human progress as necessarily implying ever-greater levels of consumption, industrialization and technological “happiness” on a massive scale, thus depriving people from different cultures of their distinctive manner of life, as well as of their land, their rituals and past history. These artworks remind us that humans are not the primary inhabitants of the earth, that key others include geological and climatological forces, besides all other living, organic, and vegetal species. In an ecocentric empathetic mode, Reggio’s films show how an ecological balance of the earth comes about from diversification and not through homogenization.

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When I first watched Koyaanisqatsi followed by Powaqqatsi, I noticed that by the end of the movie session most of the viewers inevitably made eye contact with one another; we were so emotionally shaken and at the same time in awe, for these artworks are both beautiful and shocking. A man in tears admitted to the strangers around him, “I feel so sad. I have never seen anything like this.” I was particularly moved by the many close­up sequences of faces from African children of some “developing country,” by their sheer playfulness and joyful eyes, in such a deep contrast to the visible lethargy and apathy affecting mega-city dwellers of the “first world.” In a recent interview, the director confesses that he uses “a meta language, a poetic language, not of word, but of pictures, neither linear nor logical, an aesthetic form of language to provoke feelings, sensations, different perceptions of the world in which we live” (Reggio 2013). Shifting speeds and perspectives of camera movement operate on the sensory level to provoke emotional responses in the viewers, enabling affective empathy, care and attention—perhaps even prosocial actions. Reggio (2013) brings to these films his experience as a mendicant monk for over fourteen years, having landed as “a refugee from the medieval ages” in the last quarter of the twentieth century, just before he started his filmmaker career. Perhaps for this reason, critics tend to denounce Reggio for “his seemingly reductive binary themes (old and slow is good, new and fast bad)” (Johnston 2018). In effect, Reggio’s films deplore how “everything is about speed” in our normative global culture, “as if we are trying to outrun the future” (Reggio 2013). Unquestionably, our fast-paced industrialization, urbanization and technological innovation have led to irreversible damaging effects: mental, social, cultural and environmental. As a result we should no longer uphold the “humanist” optimism for an unending economic growth that has predominated since the eighteen century. What the qatsi films do, I suggest, is ground our care for cultural difference and the Other in the vitality of their own presence, rather than in a perception of their human vulnerability when they arrive as refugees in host countries. Beyond the need for compassion, acceptance and welcoming of displaced others, we need to start questioning the mode of living under the capitalocene, and understand that in the so-called “developed world” humans are likewise losing their vital roots in the earth.

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Conclusion In this chapter, I approached five independent documentary films on present-­ day human uprootedness that may be considered ecocritical because they are likely to elicit not only ecocentric empathy and political awareness, but also ethical action. Indeed, as Sean Cubitt (2013) argues, We need to understand the functioning of ecocriticism beyond the obviously eco-themed.... Scientific ecology is the study of the mutual implication of action in every phylum, and of the complex unity of the local in its binds with the global. (279)

Just as ecocentric environmentalism cannot disregard social inequality, poverty, war and injustice, migration or refugee studies may not ignore the necropolitical causes and ecocritical aspects of contemporary mass displacement. A comprehensive ecology inevitably associates environmental responsibility to individual agency and ethics (the production of a new mentality), to a change in the economic mode of production of our society, and to a reinvention of social practices. As far back as 1995, Wangari Maathai observed how political and economic decisions being made in so-called “developed” countries were responsible for the poverty and relocation of people from third world regions: Those who are responsible for tragedies in Africa escape blame which is laid at the feet of the victims.... When Africa is projected as negatively as possible, it makes others elsewhere feel better and overlook the economic and political policies of their own countries, many of which are responsible for the situations they see on television. (Maathai 1995)

According to Maathai, foreign aid to Africa that usually comes in form of curative programs—such as famine relief and refugee camps—should instead help fund cultural, spiritual and social programs that would empower people and release their creative energy. This could in turn lead to a bioregional economic development, committed to satisfying basic needs locally, and to integrating human communities with their ecosystems. Latour (2020b) observes that “if there’s anything the coronavirus pandemic has taught us,” is that it is possible “to put an economic system on hold everywhere in the world and at the same time, a system that we were told it was impossible to slow down or redirect.” If everything can stop

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this way, then it is time to question each of our production system’s supposedly indispensable connections, to test in detail what is desirable and what has ceased to be so. If we really want to prevent forced mass relocation, we urgently need to dispute the current patterns of capitalist production and consumption, the notion of infinite economic growth, and the “productivity” logic that currently rules our social and individual existence. Indeed, this is a timely occasion to land on Earth.

References BBC News. 2019. “The refugee camp where children desire to die.” 17 Dec 2019. Accessed 31 October 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-­ europe-­50814521. Coconuts Singapore. 2016. “Singapore’s thirst for land reclamation is decimating-­ Cambodian coastal mangrove forests.” 24 Oct 2016. Accessed 31 October 2021. https://coconuts.co/singapore/news/singapores-­thirst-­land-­ reclamation-­decimating-­cambodian-­coastal-­mangrove-­forests/ Corrêa, Graça P. 2019. Longing and belonging through migration: Otherness and empathy in theatre and philosophy. Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance 9 (1): 55–66. Cox, Emma, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Agnes Woolley. 2020. Introduction. In Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities, ed. Emma Cox et al., 1–11. Edinburgh University Press. Crawley, Heaven, and Dimitris Skleparis. 2018. Refugees, migrants, neither, both: Categorical Fetishism and the Politics of bounding in Europe’s ’migration crisis’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44 (1): 48–64. Cubitt, Sean. 2013. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: Data Visualization and Ecocriticism. In Eco-Cinema Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 276–296. Routledge. De Châtel, Francesca. 2014. The role of drought and climate change in the Syrian uprising: Untangling the triggers of the revolution. Middle Eastern Studies 50 (4): 521–535. Duarte, André. 2005. Biopolitics and the dissemination of violence: the Arendtian critique of the present. HannahArendt.net: Journal for Political Thinking 1 (1): 1–15. Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul Baims and Julian Pefanis. Indiana University Press. Grobar, Matt. 2016. “’4.1 Miles’ Doc Short Director Daphne Matziaraki On Witnessing Firsthand The Reality Of The Refugee Crisis.” Deadline. 6 Dec 2016. Accessed 31 October 2021. https://deadline.com/2016/12/4-­1-­miles-­ daphne-­matziaraki-­oscars-­documentary-­shortlist-­interview-­1201859038/

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IOM-International Organization for Migration. 2014. “Migration, Environment and Climate Change: Evidence for Policy (MECLEP), Glossary.” Accessed 31 October 2021. https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/meclep_glossary_en.pdf IOM-Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (GMDAC). 2020. “Migration Data Portal.” Accessed 31 October 2021. https://migrationdataportal.org/ themes/environmental_migration IUCN-International Union for Conservation of Nature. 2017. “Study of Coastal Mangrove Forest Devastation and Channel Sedimentation, Koh Kong Report.” Accessed 31 October 2021. https://www.iucn.org/sites/dev/files/import/ downloads/mangrove_devastation_koh_kong_report_1.pdf Johnston, Trevor. 2018. “Hold that look: Godfrey Reggio on Visitors.” Sight and Sound Magazine, 20 June 2018. Accessed on 31 October 2021. https:// www2.bfi.org.uk/news-­opinion/sight-­sound-­magazine/interviews/hold-­look­godfrey-­reggio-­visitors Kermode, Jennie. 2017. “4.1 Miles Review,” Eye for Film, 3 February 2017. Accessed on 31 October 2021. https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/41-­ miles-­2016-­film-­review-­by-­jennie-­kermode. Latour, Bruno. 2017a. Anthropology at the Time of the Anthropocene: A Personal View of What Is to Be Studied. In The Anthropology of Sustainability: Beyond Development and Progress, ed. Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis, 35–49. Palgrave. ———. 2017b. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Trans. Catherine Porter. Polity. ———. 2018. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Trans. Catherine Porter. Polity. ———. 2020a. Seven Objections against Landing on Earth. In Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 10–17. MIT Press. ———. 2020b. “What protective measures can you think of so we don’t go back to the pre-crisis production model?” Translated by Stephen Muecke. Accessed 31 October 2021. http://www.bruno-­latour.fr/sites/default/files/ downloads/P-­202-­AOC-­ENGLISH_ Maathai, Wangari. 1995. “Bottlenecks to Development in Africa.” Accessed 31 October 2021. https://www.greenbeltmovement.org/wangari-­maathai/key-­ speeches-­and-­articles/bottleknecks-­to-­development-­in-­africa Malm, Andreas. 2016. Revolution in a warming world: Lessons from the Russian to the Syrian revolutions. In Socialist register 2017: Rethinking revolutions, ed. G. Albo and L. Panitch, 120–142. Monthly Review. Mazo, Jeffrey. 2010. Climate conflict: How global warming threatens security and what to do about it. IISS. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics, Trans. Steven Corcoran. Duke University Press.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception, Trans. Colin Smith. Routledge. Moore, Jason W. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. PM Press. Accessed 31 October 2021 https://orb.binghamton.edu/sociology_fac/1. Mountain Film Festival. 2019. “Lost World.” Colorado, US. 25 May 2019. Accessed 31 October 2021. https://www.mountainfilm.org/media/lost-­world National News. “’Hero of the Aegean’ who saved thousands of refugees dies in Greece,” 11 October 2018. Accessed 31 October 2021. https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/europe/hero-­of-­the-­aegean-­who-­saved-­thousands-­of-­ refugees-­dies-­in-­greece-­1.779398 Nichols, Bill. 2016. The Voice of Documentary. In The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism, ed. Jonathan Kahana, 639–651. Oxford University Press. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press. Oels, Angela. 2016. Resisting the Climate Security Discourse: Restoring ’the political’ in climate change politics. In Reframing Climate Change: Constructing ecological geopolitics, ed. Shannon O’Lear and Simon Dalby, 188–201. Routledge. Plumwood, Val. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge. Reggio, Godfrey. 2013. “We Are in the Cyborg State!” Interviewed by Nikola Danaylov, 11 Nov 2013. Accessed on 31 October 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6UhRp2CLwA. Selby, Jan, Omar S. Dahi, Christiane Fröhlich, and Mike Hulme. 2017. Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited. Political Geography 60: 232–244. Terry, Mark. 2020. The Geo-Doc: Geomedia, Documentary Film, and Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan. UNHCR-The UN Refugee Agency. 1951. “The Refugee Convention.” Accessed 31 October 2021. https://www.unhcr.org/4ca34be29.pdf. Vatican News. 2021. “Migrants rescued off Greek island of Lesbos,” 19 Jan 2021. Accessed 21 June 2021. https://www.vaticannews.va/en/world/news/2021­01/migrants-­rescued-­off-­island-­of-­lesbos.html Weil, Simone. 2002 [1949]. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. Translated by Arthur Wills. Routledge. Woolley, Agnes. 2020. Docu/Fiction and the Aesthetics of the Border. In Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities, ed. Emma Cox, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Agnes Woolley, 146–164. Edinburgh University Press.

PART III

The Refugee Novel

CHAPTER 8

Splitting Apart, Coming Together: Bildung (…shards…) into Mosaic-Being through Performance of the Refugee and Forced-­Migration Bildungsroman Alexandra Christian Budny

For all those who may enter, Ismet Prcić’s novel Shards (2011) immediately sets the stage with a declarative salvo of an epigraph page, beginning with a quote from Shakespeare’s canonical coming-of-age story, Hamlet— or, more specifically and significantly, Hamlet’s stage-notes to his theatrical players, directing that they use their own initiative in performing their scene-within-the-scene to “hold the mirror up” to nature. Prcić then pairs this Shakespearean fragment with another from exile-poet Saadi Youssef, who, upon describing a scene of mirror-shards scattered amongst branches, instructs the l’akdhar (the poet) to gather the broken pieces together in any way he likes in order to “preserve the memory of the branch.”

A. C. Budny (*) Belvedere, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Classon Frangos, S. Ghose (eds.), Refugee Genres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2_8

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As Eike Kronshage has explored in the “Function of Poetic Epigraphs” (2013/2014), epigraphic pairing functions even further to set the narrative imperative, and establish a very specific set of rules for the work to follow. The command for truth-through-art here posits an explicit act of mosaic-making necessary to forge from reality’s splinters a more essential kind of authenticity: for when all that has come before breaks apart, the after becomes an exercise in aesthetic and relational means. Rather than so-called realistic composition, the poet’s relation to the world is in this case one of mosaic-maker, bouncing off reflections of reality at angles, setting it into relief through a foundation of creative design. What is more, fusing Shakespeare’s canonical text with a fragment “translated from Arabic,” even without explicitly contextualizing Saadi Youssef as an Iraqi artist of exile, memory, and dislocation, prepares the reader for an act of mosaic-making that transforms the “traditional” with an-other that demands something different, and more. These fragments deliver in the work of refugee-author Prcić, whose novel Shards delineates a special kind of coming-together in the literary sub-genre of Refugee and Forced Migration Bildungsroman. While the Bildungsroman is nothing new, in the coming-of-age story’s combination of “education” [bildung] with novel [roman], the transformative pairing of the literary form with Refugee and Forced Migration experience comes with remarkable results. In the interplay between fabula and syuzhet, story and discourse, content and form,1 the plot at first glance is of “Ismet’s” (eponymous narrator/subject) coming-of-age through wartime (Bosnia), escape (through a theater group’s traveling show), attempted return, and eventual settlement (in America). However, the telling which follows from the story’s inceptional epigraph reveals nothing is as it initially seems: here, where it is only in the very unique capacities of literary form, as this chapter will describe, that allows for both the destruction of traditional modes of understanding and being (the shattering of the mirror), and the construction of an alternative (in the artist-poet-storyteller’s assemblage of the pieces), is the act which Refugee and Forced Migration experience will be seen to both necessitate and provide. For it is the Refugee and Forced Migration Bildungsroman that allows, develops, and puts into relation precisely that which would be otherwise forbidden, spurned, and held apart by the traditional discourse surrounding the Refugee and Forced Migration subject. As Joseph Slaughter has 1

 On these terms, see Phelan and Rabinowitz (2012).

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delineated in the revelatory “fictions” he lays out in Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (2007), the novel form of the Bildungsroman operates precisely where that subject has been previously objectified, passivized, and silenced by dominant structures, their experiences collapsed and exploded as anathema to the dominant nation-state understanding of selfhood. Yet, rather than lament the Refugee and Forced Migration subject’s position, this chapter seeks to recuperate the narrative act as not just reformative but revolutionary: such a work builds upon Homi Bhabha’s vision of writing in-between, multi-­ storied, multi-valent, and poly-vocal worlds in The Location of Culture (1994), and the particular nexus illuminated by Trinh T. Minh-ha’s refugee and poet-artist working in the state of “becoming and un-becoming” in her Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (2011). Where the Refugee and Forced Migration experience demands something else, something more, the literary form thus provides—and as such, in fact, performs. The Refugee and Forced Migration Bildungsroman, as coming-of-age “education” [bildung] novel [roman], is charged with the unique ability and demand to construct this alternate experience of coming-into-self for the reader.2 So does the experience of Prcić’s novel Shards (re)create the Refugee and Forced Migration experience, and all its inherent (alternative) insights and understandings therein, with the Refugee and Forced Migration subject at the helm. In this way, the Refugee and Forced Migration Bildungsroman proves a constitutive performance, per form: Where everything is revealed to be inextricably connected, in those fragments which must be put-together to be made-­ whole, all comes together in the telling. Methodologically, this chapter that follows performs a critical reading of how particular literary narratological techniques of “denaturalization” are explicitly mined for their capacity to allow the proliferation, expression, and connection of these shards: specifically, in the coexistence and mingling of these contradictory pieces that, when put together, make up the impossible experience of the Refugee and Forced Migration subject in a state of Mosaic-Being. While the field of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies is rife with examinations along conceptual lines, of the experience 2  Michael Balfour has prized the exercise to stay where “the paradox, the uncomfortable elements, hold their form” (2013), while Alison Jeffers has called for the refugee stories to be told and heard around forms of embodied experience, “dynamic ways of knowing,” and those performances of naming where “experimentation becomes possible” (2012).

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of witnessing and the constraints of testimony, of displacement and disconnection, of trauma and re-membering, this study argues for the place of narratology in offering a particular conceptual yield in the reconstruction and constitution of these states-of-being through the performance of the text.3 This chapter is made up of a constitutive fragmentation and multiplicity, whirling and splitting pieces coming together into the following domains: 1) Truth of Structure, through footnotes, asterisked annotations, formatting of excerpt, memoir, diary-entries, and letters; 2) Identity of Narrator/Subject(s), through shifting first- and third-person narrative modes, “unreliable” narrators/narration and narrative “unreliability”; and 3) Sense of (Con)Text, through onomatopoetic text and extreme forms of narration, including second-person narrative mode and stream-of-­ consciousness. The first, with forms of address, kinds of narrative, qualification and annotation through manifold literary facets, builds a new kind of truth in the alchemical interplay of testimony, fact and fiction, expectations of experience, and contradictory realities. The second, with different voices, presences, and influences of varying confounding narrator/subjects in a proliferation of angles and perspectives, builds a new kind of identity, in abandonment of the solitary through a comingled dispersion of selves and belonging. The third, with different intervening forces, sites of rupture, and enduring legacies, builds a new kind of sense, in a body of memory and post/present trauma that continuously affects and effects the subject of experience and the possibility of understanding. With each collapsing and confounding binaries between truth/fiction, natural/unnatural, human/inhuman, past/present, here/there, I/You We/They, the resulting assemblage is a transcendently exceptional act.

Truth of Structure From the epigraph onward, qualifications and complications built within the complex structure of the work itself create an ontological ambiguity, where the narrative shards seem to contradict or erase themselves in a proliferation of possibilities, demanding of the reader a role in the meaning-­making of the story as a whole (cf. Richardson 2013, 20–23, 19–20). Indeed, for this novel, it is a methodology that enacts its own 3  This chapter draws especially upon the approach of “unnatural narratology,” in particular the work of Brian Richardson (2006).

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lessons and re-creates its own nature of being. For the novel resists a “traditional” reading from the very beginning. The next page that follows from the opening epigraphs is a non-contextualized excerpt, bearing only the bolded title “(…an excerpt from notebook one: the escape by ismet prcič…),” and a selection from a third-person narrative recounting a character “Mustafa’s” training for war. Only later will the novel introduce Mustafa, first as a mysterious coming-of-age counterpart to the narrating character-­ protagonist “Ismet,” then as a kind of alter-ego birthed by Ismet’s traumas and experiences. Only after this un-contextualized twopage excerpt does the novel seemingly “begin” and reveal the start of the first notebook at large. On myriad levels, and across form and content, these initial pages thus inculcate an enigmatic feeling of anticipation, where experience becomes paramount above initial understanding. The text demands experience of the narrative from within, even as it becomes increasingly alienated and schizophrenic, where a descent into madness is twinned with paradoxically increasing sense. Narratological theory engages with different “kinds of narrative” and forms of text that affect reader expectation and the experience of reading as a whole.4 In the novel Shards, the upending of expectation in a cumulatively building experience of splitting and assemblage proves not merely descriptive, but in fact constitutive of the Refugee and Forced Migration experience. The narrative is divided into notebooks, which would formally herald a clear division and enunciation between each notebook; however already in each notebook’s title page is the qualification with an asterisked footnote, of increasingly provocative provenance. In the first notebook, it seems merely to indicate that the writing has been sent to “Eric Carlson,” who, the narration will reveal, is one of “Ismet’s” American friends. While a seemingly innocuous detail to start, these details accumulate, the once logistical footnote spiraling into a tumultuous narrative upending. By the final notebook, and that notebook’s asterisked footnote, it is suggested that the accumulation of notebooks has been performed by Eric, upon “Ismet’s” possible death, and that Ismet’s final wish dictates his friend read all of this and try to piece me together. The footnote continues: “Bound as I am by this last will and testament, I’m including a portion of this notebook here.” After 374 pages, these words thus upend and re-(in)form the reader’s experience of the novel. Emerging out of what may once have 4  See for example Franz Karl Stanzel’s generic schematizations (1984) and H.  Porter Abbott’s work on form-usage (2011, 187–200).

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been a growing unspoken suspicion comes clear the jarring voice of a footnoted first-person “I” that could be, for the first time, that of Eric, not Ismet. The narrative revelation renders the telling of the Refugee and Forced Migration subject’s story to be an explicitly collective act—in the collection of the pieces and the collective role between story teller and told. For Ismet the author, in whole flesh-and-blood, who brings these pieces together, and in the interplay between subject and reader, “Ismet” and Eric, who suggest that the act of subject formation and understanding must be done collectively in the telling. The self, by itself (or as a self), cannot perform this alone. So too are expectations within each notebook, and their corresponding types of text, transgressed and transformed. Every notebook is divided into sub-sections, split between titled chapters—“fragments” significantly formatted as in the novel’s title page, (…shards…), with elliptical and parenthetical brackets—and “diary excerpts,” which are marked by bolded font and dated headings, as in Excerpts from Ismet Prcić’s Diary from September 1998. At the outset, the non-bolded sub-section titles seem to be a relatively straightforward first-person narration by “Ismet,” whereas the diary entries are more personal disclosures addressed to his mother. In one of the early diary entries, Ismet seems to refer to these non-bolded sub-sections as writing he is doing for a “memoir,” as prescribed by a volunteer doctor on his American college campus for his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: “He says that pills are only a short-term solution and that in order to really get better I need to put my experience in a larger framework to help me make sense out of the whole thing” (Prcić 2011, 22). Putting these sections of the narrative under this mandate unpacks myriad valences of meaning—for one, it illuminates the dynamic between the Western host-country “professional” who knows, and the subject-sufferer“victim” who is labeled and prescribed. Furthermore, the prescription in this case comes in the explicit form of a kind of testimony (“memoir”). What this narrative does is break out of the confines, and buck against the “tragedy” of victimhood by successfully building the Refugee and Forced Migration subject into being through form.5 For already in its instantiation, the narrative further qualifies and complicates at the point where Ismet reveals he is having trouble separating 5  These dynamics have been provocatively engaged, from the likes of Joseph Slaughter (2007) to the famous analyses performed by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in their Testimony: Crises of Witnessing In Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992).

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fact from fiction in his attempted memoir. The doctor tells him our brains constantly edit or excise “truths” from our memory “when those events do not fit into the narrative of our own lives… Don’t worry about what is true and what is not, you’ll drive yourself crazy. Just you write. Write everything” (Prcič 2011, 22).. Immediately following this disclosure, as the designs of narrative mandate, the novel transitions from diary-entry into a non-bolded subsection which recounts (through third-person narration) the character Mustafa’s inner thoughts, truths, and feelings. Thus, in its structure and design, the elucidation of content through its form, the unfolding of narration seems to constantly re-contextualize what the narration is performing as it resists traditional understanding and reveals new rules. “Mustafa” can be part of “Ismet’s” narration of “his” life, as facts can live alongside fiction in the cathartic release of “everything.” So too in the manner of address does the narrative complicate and question, challenge and confuse. In the beginning, the memoiric subsections would seem addressed to a more traditional default narratee, whereas the diary-entries are more intimate and addressed to his mother—but again, already such distinctions are challenged and qualified from the outset. When Ismet writes in his diary entry “Mother, oh, mati, I’m sorry; everything I write to you is a lie. / I’m not okay” (Prcić 2011, 20), it gestures toward another, unseen, form of narration that Ismet has been performing for his mother, where he suggests he is okay. As the novel goes on, it becomes increasingly unclear and indistinct whether anything ever addressed to his mother is actually intended for her eventual receipt (a complex intermingling between the diary- and letter-forms of address)— indeed, as it is revealed that his mother suffers from her own struggles, and has attempted to take her own life, Ismet in his narration seems to recount a desire to protect her from his own realities, even as he is unable to help her in hers (Prcić 2011, 120). The significance of narrative-address becomes further heightened and re-contextualized by this narrative unfolding.6 If Ismet’s diary entries are indeed never intended to reach her, then the address to his mother is a performance of the truths that can only be disclosed here, in the narrative space. This is brought home by the novel’s conclusion, in the final twist of a possible letter written as if by Ismet’s mother, where she (if it is she) asks if he is alive, and discloses: “I’m writing this even though I don’t know these things. I’m writing this because I 6  On narrative address, see James Phelan in his Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (2005).

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have to, because I have to tell you something that I cannot, that I never could, not even to myself” (388). Without the usual asterisk of e­ xplanation, which may or may not (the reader now knows) be by Eric’s hand, the “true” origin of this would-be “letter” remains mysterious and ambiguous. But this is, the novel argues and performs, precisely the point: this narrative space, in the telling, which can hold all the ambiguities and paradoxes, and release all that has been otherwise repressed. As “she” recounts that his friend Eric has sent her a letter and a book, so too does this conclusion bring all the players together, just as the pieces, once held apart, come into alignment. What is most “true,” then, is this wild, disorienting cumulative effect in which the breakdown is the build: of the Refugee and Forced Migration subject into being.

Identity of Narrator/Subject(s) So it is, that no one account of this story, or re-counting told within an individual segment can be taken at face value, for as the novel reveals itself, it becomes clear that no one perspective is meant to be held as the irrevocably “authorized” version of truth—only as a collective can it be understood. So too for the subject of Refugee and Forced Migration experience, identity proves a proliferation, not a unitary state: in the heightened execution of what Brian Richardson describes where “the breakdown of the notion of a stable self has been effective in unleashing a polyphony of discourses within an individual and a compelling image of the fragmented nature of the self” (2006, 136). These notebooks reveal a spiraling fragmentation of narrator/subject(s) and voices, mingling “Ismet” with Mustafa at increasing variability and frequency. Mustafa’s first “narrative” is provided right after Ismet reveals in one of his diary entries, addressed again to his mother, that “at first it worked…but as I kept at it, things— little fictions—started to sneak in. I agonized over them, tried to eradicate them from the manuscript, but it made the narrative somehow less true…” (Prcić 2011, 22). This foreign presence, which begins as another but becomes increasingly entangled with Ismet himself, pushes itself into the narrative with the increasing interruptive multiplicity demanded by the Refugee and Forced Migration experience. This intensifying “unnatural” build of Mustafa’s being thus twins alongside Ismet’s increasing awareness, and fulminating emotion, surrounding the sense of the self-that-­ could-have-been: Mustafa, as the one who did not escape, the one who remains, and is conscripted into war, lives as projected narrativized reality

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of what could-have-been for Ismet, and what is for others. What lives in Ismet’s painstaking inescapability from his home, his family, and the realities of war becomes a part of his story, the coming-of-age of his peers which haunt and remind him until they inextricably mesh with his own. In the beginning of the delineation between “Ismet” and “Mustafa,” Ismet’s stories are narrated in the first-person “I,” while Mustafa’s are recounted as through a third-person transcription of story being performed by Ismet. As they are set out originally, the two subjects, though sharing certain qualities, such as a childhood predilection for ninjas, are set apart (Prcič 2011, 54, 93). But when Ismet witnesses a soldier shooting a mad dog, he ascribes to that soldier all of the qualities the reader already knows as fitting Mustafa (164), and lines previously drawn begin to blur. After a shelling occurs soon afterwards, Ismet tells of visiting a grave bearing the name “Mustafa Nalić,” and Ismet’s compulsion toward Mustafa grows (165). Already doubting the veracity of his memories, and challenging the possibility of his own sanity, Ismet’s narrative now explicitly raises into doubt whether Mustafa’s narrative and life are entirely his own imagining, as he recounts to his mother in a “Diary Entry” that he cannot stop “daydreaming” Mustafa’s life as I wait for mine to make sense (193). Of course, as this text performs, Mustafa proves a crucial, inextricable part to making-sense (of self, and story): But only in the de-construction of traditional sense and self, and the relinquishment of its unitary understanding of truth and belonging. Ismet comes to this point of relinquishment in yet another example of what Brian Richardson terms “denarration” (2006, 87), when he runs into an old man who may or may not have sheltered Mustafa as a refugee (Prcić 2011, 179). Here, in yet more contradictory ambiguities of text (and experience), Mustafa is literarily given-life, with “Ismet” as narrator ceding to the place of Mustafa’s narrative. Ismet tells in a “Diary Entry”: “I give up, mati. I gave up. This book about my life cannot be written. Not by me, anyway… Why do I write about Mustafa? Why does Mustafa have my memories?” (337) After relinquishing in both past and present tense, where Ismet has already “given up” his authorially singular intent to memoir-ize, or his ability to contain a self-that-is-solely-his in written form, the narrative then transitions to a scene in which Ismet, considering ending his own life, imagines Mustafa materializing in his own backyard in San Diego. Ismet now narrates a surreal standoff in which Mustafa takes a pistol from Ismet’s hand and aims it at him, in a fantastical dream-version of Homi Bhabha’s pronouncement that “in another’s country that is also

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your own, your person divides, and in following the forked path you encounter yourself in a double movement” (1994, xxv). The narratingIsmet, who once “dictated” Mustafa’s life, perhaps created it whole-cloth, survives the encounter, and resolves to “Live his new life” (Prcić 2011, 350). But then crucially, on the next page, for the first time, Mustafa, speaks, thinks, and assumes the narratorial reins for himself under the firstperson “I” (Prcić, 2011, 351). This “multiperson” narration provides what Richardson describes in his “I, etcetera,” that “the pronoun ‘I,’ far from being monolithic, is in fact multivalent: it includes…. ‘I/i (the plural, non-unitary subject)’” (2006, 74). This fragmentation and plurality allow for the building of a subject outside singular designs or what Richardson terms “monolithic” kinds of knowing, where all have a place (and must be heard) in the being of Refugee and Forced Migration experience. The novel’s conclusion provides the final pieces of connection linking one to another in the interstices of the mosaic, in the possible-letter written as if by Ismet’s mother. She asks, “Do you know someone named Mustafa Nalić? He writes that he knows you but I don’t remember…He sent me this note and thanked me for visiting him in the hospital…” (Prcič 2011, 389/390). This inclusion explodes a range of questions, and a proliferation of shards from the narrative’s unfolding. The allusion to Mustafa recalls one particularly surreal and ambiguous sub-section, switching between Ismet’s third-person narration and Mustafa’s first-person perspective, around Mustafa’s injury during wartime battle, and the hospital visit of a woman thinking herself his mother, while Mustafa is unsure (371). A letter she brings Mustafa may or may not have been addressed to him, as he tries to make out the letters and sees “perhaps an I…it was impossible to be 100 percent certain” (374). Just as Mustafa becomes disoriented and unsure, as Ismet becomes the same, the narrative itself demands the same degree of disorientation and uncertainty. By this final point in the narrative, with the mother’s letter (or not), ambiguity and multiplicity itself become part of the very function of the narrative-act, designed and intended, purposefully constitutive of the Refugee and Forced Migration experience and subjectivity. Mustafa is as true to and inextricable from Ismet’s story as “Ismet,” where that, which Trinh T. Minh-ha describes as “Other Than Myself, My Other Self” (2011, 27), is as real a narrative presence and force as the many selves which form the subjecthood and experience of Refugee and Forced Migration being: for the telling makes-real, and makes-whole, that which would otherwise be left in shards.

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Sense of (Con)Text The pervasiveness of these truthful fictions and plural subjectivities to the Refugee and Forced Migration experience is laid bare by the embodied sense of-being best enacted around the onomatopoetic explosion of “BOOM” in the text. With this conceptually evocative device, the increasing presence of “BOOM,” like the increasing presence of Mustafa, becomes a synecdoche for the un-ignorable and uncontrollable proliferation of shards, lodging like so many pieces of shrapnel which will irrevocably mark the figurative body of being. Hybridized with varyingly, and increasingly, extreme forms, it appears first alongside second-person narration, parlaying what Brian Richardson describes as “new possibilities of creative representation, particularly for revealing a mind in flux” (2006, 35). It appears last among the fractured fairytale motif twinned with a stream-of-consciousness in which, in Richardson’s terms, “the reader wonders whether the narrator is incompetent, disorientated, devious, or insane” (2006, 93). The trajectory is thus one firmly fixing the reader along for the ride, as the traditional, “rational” frameworks of sense are exploded to make way for this crucially embodied sense, in-sense, of being. Here, where, as Ryoko Sasamoto gestures in his Onomatopoeia and Relevance to Sotaro Kita’s invocation of a “vivid at-the-scene feeling” (2019, 3), affect and feeling are evoked—where all falls apart and comes together in the telling. Falling within the category of “iterative onomatopoeia” (Simpson 2004), “BOOM” is on one level operating as a graphemic cue for embodiment and sensate experience. What is more, it suggests a significant resonance, as un-ignorable reverberation through space and body, versus the more subtle (like a “Plink,” as shall be seen later in this section). The introduction of a “BOOM” thus performs a rupture, marking a stop for whatever has preceded by announcing itself before anything can follow. The introduction of “BOOM” here enters crucially in the context of a wartime shelling—also, marking significantly, the first shift into a second-­ person “You” narrative mode. The reader is thus doubly impelled and compelled, conscribed and embodied to experience this sequence firsthand. It starts with an interruption from sleep, jarring into narrative-­ beginning: “You wake up in the middle of the night” (Prcić 2011, 78). Moved from the previous position of Ismet’s first-person depictions, which recount as-past those events which have already occurred, this narrative sequence simulates as-present the happening of the night’s events.

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This construction of a more direct experience is further cued by the nature of the mind-body narration: “You ransack your brain to discover nothing but leftovers of an already distant nightmare. You can’t recall your age. The baseless urgency you feel sitting on your chest borders on panic and you have no idea where it’s coming from…” (78). The mind and body are in response to an as-yet unnamed stimulus—the only hint which has been given to the experience, as of yet, is the title of the sub-section itself, an elliptic reference to “(… the night you return to bosnia …)”, and the surroundings reveal, as yet, only the squeaking of a hamster wheel and Donald Duck bed sheets. In a tense silence, “What the fuck is going on? you think.” Then, next line: “BOOM!” (78). With the explosion of this first-hand wartime bombing experience, the “Boom!” is distinguished and raised in priority as a graphical index. It is given a life of its own, intervening and accented in its performance with the addition of a paired exclamation mark (!), as well as what will now be a varied manifestation across a range of larger sizes, all-caps, in bolded font.7 On a visual register, before even engaging the representational power and meaning of the words themselves, “BOOM” now stands out, apart, littering and marking the pages in which it appears to attract attention above all else. The unfolding of this segment continues with implications on multiple levels. After the first BOOM!, notably, “You sit there, still waiting” for another sound as-­ answer to the situation at hand, but nothing comes. Silence lies in full, fecund complicity. The home-setting becomes hostile in its familiarity, cloaking the as-yet-unknown intruder. Silence, darkness, unknowing are all the true setting, as the mind searches. “You” have no control over when, or if, the next “BOOM” will come. This might reside at the level of onomatopoetic referent alone if it were merely incorporated to highlight the loudness of the sound itself (especially as in the contrast between sound and silence). But the execution of this sound-cipher acts as more. Derek Attridge’s conception of onomatopoeia is useful here as well, as in his discussion of its connection to the possibility of “poeticity” related, for him, to Jakobson’s notion of onomatopoeia as “the essence of language,” and his argument for its art (2004, 11). The nature of this “boom” is an active agent in the text that intervenes in the narration: its presence is that which cannot be controlled by the you-being-there (in the live-time narration of the story). As “you” 7  See in particular Mieke Bal (1985) on the narratological functions and implications of the exclamation mark.

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go down to the bomb shelter, the narration attempts to regain control, unsuccessfully, wondering about dad and “Perhaps he’s/ BOOM!” (Prcić 2011, 81). The level of interruption has increased, where the sentence itself in-process cannot continue when the shelling imposes itself onto scene/mind/body/being. The frequency and degree increase still. The act of narration attempts to engage again, not even attempting to wonder now but at the level of mere description, as for example, “The family doesn’t seem t BOOM!” (81). Amped up from its first appearance into striking between first sentences, then between words, then truncating individual letters of graphemic meaning itself, the pressure on the attempted narration rises exponentially as the bolded and exclamatory rebound of the BOOM! imposes itself seemingly whenever it wishes. Of course, a shell itself, in traditional understanding, holds no directed agency apart from the human being operating it—if the scene were to be schematized according to more “realistic” means, the sound itself would most likely mark the number and time of bombs falling faster or slower, nearer or farther, impassive to the inhabitants of a neighborhood bomb shelter and the child within. This telling, however, makes it personal. The “BOOM” grows into an unrelenting, unremitting, and unmerciful side-character (and antagonist): “You” try to sleep, only for three booms to sound: “BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!/ You sit back up” (Prcić 2011, 81). Left without recourse, shaken and pushed into a form of altered state, “you” begin to feel a blurring between fiction and reality. The text calibrates the loss of individual agency and rational sense with this invasion of the surreal. The narration has previously described and constructed the visceral embodied presence of Ismet’s guilt for leaving and returning to Bosnia (to Croatia, and eventually through Scotland to the United States). “Your mind play tricks on you” (81), as a woman screams TRAITOR! (“They all know you haven’t been there since the beginning”). “You” attempt to discern “reality”: “It’s not possib/ BOOM!/ “le … Le? … Not possible … What? … You forget what you were thinking about. You are not sure” (81). The abstraction of each grapheme, in itself, becomes analogic to the impossibility of marshaling sense together from the fragments of non-sense being experienced in the midst of war. The “-le” in itself becomes nonsensical, and separated from a context of “rational-thought,” the fragment becomes a symbol instead of the inefficacy of rationality in this kind of subjectified experience. Sense indeed becomes all-consuming, all there is in the experience. As the sequence concludes, “You can’t remember anything. You push your body against the wall…” Then,

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between the “BOOM,” “… the wall is rough…” and “… nothing …” Finally: “BOOM!” (84). When “nothing” else remains, this sense does. And it will follow, as a permanent fixture in the body-of-being the Refugee and Forced Migration subject, coming-of-age. Ismet discovers this when he escapes with his theatrical troupe through Edinburgh, where a fireworks display’s “BOOM” sends him and his fellow young players onto the ground in fear while the older members are unfazed: “Asmir and the musicians were older. They remembered with fully-formed adult bodies and minds life before the war. Before chaos, they’d known order, before senselessness, sense…But if you were forged in the chaos, then there was no return. There was no escape…” (Prcić 2011, 240). This sense, thus internalized into the body from the processes inhabited above, comes too from within. As Ismet recounts in a diary entry addressed to his mother, when he “senselessly” punches someone during a return visit to Bosnia and his heart pounds: “BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! I can’t wait to get out of here, mati…” (115). This time back in Bosnia, described later by his stateside therapist as a regression back from his attempts to heal from the experience of war, is paired with another seemingly nonsensical act of violence and the return of the “BOOM”—Ismet’s own iteration of that which he knows, and that which he has been taught by the sense(lessness) of war. He wishes to escape, and yet, as he divulges to his mother in another diary entry, “I don’t miss home, mati. I’m there all the time. In the past. In fiction” (41). The “BOOM” lives within him, is inseparable from him, just as his senses remain in the body of memory that keeps past in present, there in here, and self with other. This realization is brought into particular relief as the novel nears completion: this entry, which comes after the revelation of Eric’s possible narrative role, is annotated with the asterisk: “*This is the final entry and it appears here exactly as it does in the original without any of my meddling. Bear with it” (Prcić 2011, 385). After this kind of warning apology to the “unnatural” state of narration, the entry itself indeed seems to perform the ultimate explosion into shards, starting with a seemingly innocuous and inviting fairytale story where “Once upon a time” a human convict has been sentenced to solitary confinement. As he is led down the corridor to his punishment for transgressing “the ego of a BOOM! particular guard…” (385), the reader is alerted to what is coming—by the time he is locked inside, he “reaches for a BOOM! button,” again, as before, the interruption of story, but this time, from no obvious, external or

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explainable original source. Not his heart, or a set of fireworks, no shells are to be found. The room is his own madness, his own sentence which he is prepared to battle. He rips loose a button from his prison uniform, and like a Kafkaesque dervish, begins to spin, ten times, then throws the button over his shoulder. Each time is counted, “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten times” (386), and then, after he tosses the button, he “listens to it plink, plink, plinkey-plink, plink, plink on the concrete until there’s a silence BOOM! goes down his hands and knees and begins the search anew…” (386). This minute detail, and painstaking moment-­ by-­moment recitation of form, is not by chance, for: “he needs to pretend there’s something, this task of finding the button over and over, or telling himself a story over and over, to keep the mind busy so it doesn’t short-­ circuit itself” (387). In this way, the reader has been brought into the body-of-being, and inhabits the mind of the subject, with each spin, the differentiation of each plink, and the burst of every “BOOM.” Such attempts to rigidly marshal experience to reality here are foiled, though, as the “BOOM” takes over. In the first occurrence, the “BOOM” literally gets bigger through ascending font sizes in the text, descending upon him, as it all falls apart (and comes together): “…but BOOM! I can’t do it. I can’t keep telling myself this story because the BOOM! shells are hitting closer and closer…”(Prcić 2011 387). The “BOOM” knocks the narrative from third- to first-person, and speeds the narrative blur as the previous shards of Ismet’s (California) and Mustafa’s (hospital room) intermingle. There, where “my” heart is climbing “into my thoughts, pounding there, BOOM! as I wish I were in prison right now… searching for a bBOOM!utton instead of suffering this pounding” (387). This stream-of-consciousness thus qualifies the fugue-fairytale as a projection of an internal state-of-mind and being, the “BOOM” again increasing its interruption into the letters of text itself as the pounding which lives in the body of being, the “pounding of memory,” the pounding of “it all” that demands until finally, “the pounding of volatile muscles turning rigid in the fleeting world far below, down there, where into my (pounding) ephemeral ear the sidewalk shall whisper the truth BOOM!” (387). This crescendo makes the act of fracture into an act of assemblage. Narrative modes and thematic threads converge, components whir and blend, into one explosive confluence of being; this body of being which then becomes its own condition of (im)possibility. The concluding pages that follow contain the possible-letter as written by Ismet’s mother, which relates how “Americans sent me pictures of a body to identify… They said

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you jumped off a building, killed yourself… But it wasn’t you, was it? … Inconclusive, they said…” (Prcić 2011, 388). That body is not the conclusive body-of-being, is not the definitive “Ismet.” It is the body being pieced together in the telling, the coming-together rendered in the body of the text, that makes what Michael Balfour and Nina Woodrow describe in Refugee Performance as the refugee “body-as-a-poem”—where trauma has been previously somatized, experience internalized, and the subject silenced, performance “disrupts and re-tells a powerful story” (2013, 17). Here appropriating and exploding the narrative space to make known the “true” embodied “sense” of “identity” of the Refugee and Forced Migration subject.

Performance into Being In these building crescendos of whirling, splitting assemblage, the increasingly radical and extreme or “unnatural” reading experience thus creates and performs its own insights, while interactively demanding of the reader a role in the making. The ride yields knowing experience as a roiling, contradictory, raw, and multifold proliferation of story-in-situ. The power of this form reaches peak clarity in light of one of Ismet’s final shards, significantly staged as a direct address to Eric that intimately discloses the key to Refugee and Forced Migration being (and storytelling as such). This “EVERYTHING,” which comes to him out of an epiphanic dream, is a kind of metafictive mission-statement of the text as a whole, in which Ismet declares, “In the beginning there was Light. In the beginning there was the Word. In the beginning there was the Voice. In the beginning there was the Voice using Words to bring the Light into existence by uttering the word Light into the void…” (Prcić 2011, 377). Such performance crucially parallels the great Creation Story of the (King James) Bible, where: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep […] And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, and it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.” Embodying this act thereby exemplifies J.L.  Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962), in which naming proves not merely descriptive but performatively constitutive, where the saying makes it so: “If something can be created out of nothing by the sheer utterance of sound that gives meaning to it, then the only difference between something and nothing is in the naming…” (Prcić 2011, 377). Repetition has been a tool

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throughout the novel, in a kind of rhythmic fracking that creates meaning through the instantiation of a repetition-with-difference; the same words, repeated again, become like an incantation, or the recurrence of a dream, that gains significance with each coming iteration.8 Here, it is revealed to be nothing less than the rhythm of life, in those words giving form to the Refugee and Forced Migration subject by bringing into-(Mosaic)Being. For, if previously “Ismet” as narrator has chastized and maligned himself for his inability to bring meaning through the content of his life, the narrative as a whole is being advanced as-meaning in itself. The point is run home by this section’s conclusion, in which Ismet contextualizes how “we hope” that there is something out there “that follows us, watches over us, narrates us, dreams us into being” (Prcič 2011, 378), and “we hope” that this means something. Asking what this something is, in the form of a multiple-choice test, options are given as: a. God, b. The narrator, c. Ismet, d. Mustafa, e. What?, f. Me, g. You, h. Who gives a shit?, i. Something, h. Nothing, k. All of the above, l. None of the above, and finally, m. All/none of the above. Upside down, the “answer key,” as in a school textbook, reveals: “If you answered ‘m. All/none of the above,’ you are on your way to become nothing” (379). This final “test” thus teases at the entire enterprise of the novel’s undertaking. Kevin Paul Smith has suggested that “the process of narrativisation has come to be seen as a central form of human comprehension, of imposition of meaning and formal coherence on the chaos of events” (2007, 120). It is story-telling that essentially brings all the pieces together, but not, crucially, “together” in the sense of parts which assimilate into uniform unitary being. Here, “coherence” is understood not as the logical and orderly, the clear or reasonable relationship between parts, as the Cambridge dictionary entry on the word might suggest, but as the Oxford dictionary’s intervention on the “coherent” which sticks together, a descendent of its Latin root “cohaerere” as, Mauro Giuffrè points out (2017, 56), that which joins and attaches. If every facet of form has complicated and confused the possibility of narration and meaning-making, here the novel Shards admits and embraces this complexity, ambiguity, and disorientation as constitutive to the Refugee and Forced Migration subject. Where traditional understandings of truth, identity, and sense are rendered 8  See Gérard Genette’s explorations of the “Singulative/Iterative” under Frequency in his Narrative Discourse (1980, 113), as well as Ursula Heise’s engagement with Temporal Experience and Narrative Form in “Chronoschisms” (2005, 73).

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meaningless to Refugee and Forced Migration experience, it is the narrative space of the Refugee and Forced Migration Bildungsroman that allows constructive-construction of the alternative, in the mosaic of Being. It is the Refugee and Forced Migration subject’s coming-of-age, and coming-­ into-­being, through form in the Bildungsroman that builds this education, piece by piece, for the reader as for the subject. It is in the Shards, come together in the naming. It is, the novel argues, life.

References Abbott, H. Porter. 2011. Time, Narrative, Life, Death, and Text-Type Distinctions: The Example of Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year. Narrative 19 (2): 187–200. Attridge, Derek. 2004. Peculiar Language. Routledge. Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Clarendon Press. Balfour, Michael, ed. 2013. Refugee Performance: Practical Encounters. University of Chicago Press. Balfour, Michael, and Nina Woodrow. 2013. On Stitches. In Refugee Performance: Practical Encounters, ed. Michael Balfour, 17–34. University of Chicago Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. 1992. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Routledge. Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse. Cornell University Press. Giuffrè, Mauro. 2017. The Concept of Textuality in the Procedural Approach: Seven Criteria. In Text Linguistics and Classical Studies, 56–74. Springer International Publishing. Heise, Ursula. 2005. Chronoschisms. In Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy, 361–386. Duke University Press. Jeffers, Alison. 2012. Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities. Palgrave Macmillan. Kronshage, Eike. 2013/2014. The Function of Poetic Epigraphs in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Connotations 23 (2): 230–260. Minh-ha, Trinh T. 2011. Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration. Refugeeism and the Boundary Event: Routledge. Phelan, James. 2005. Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Cornell University Press. Phelan, James, and Peter J. Rabinowitz. 2012. Narrative as Rhetoric. In Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates, ed. David Herman, James Phelan, Peter J.  Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol, 3–8. Ohio State Press. Prcić, Ismet. 2011. Shards. Black Cat.

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Richardson, Brian. 2006. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Ohio State Press. Sasamoto, Ryoko. 2019. Onomatopoeia and Relevance: Communication of Impressions Via Sound. Palgrave Macmillan. Simpson, Paul. 2004. Stylistics: A Resource Book. Routledge. Slaughter, Joseph R. 2007. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. Fordham University Press. Smith, Kevin Paul. 2007. The Postmodern Fairytale: Folkloric Intertexts in Contemporary Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan. Stanzel, Franz Karl. 1984. A Theory of Narrative. Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 9

Shattered Forms: Transnational Migration Literatures in Melilla and the Balkan Refugee Route Gorica Majstorovic

Introduction In this chapter I engage current approaches to migration and the aesthetics of the fragment by reading postcolonial migrant narratives located at two EU entry points: Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel’s novel The Gurugu Pledge (2017), and Hassan Blasim’s short story “Why Don’t You Write a Novel, Instead of Talking About All These Characters?” from the collection The Iraqi Christ (2013). Both narratives engage wider political, social and economic forces at work in the rapidly changing and deeply uneven contemporary world. Both authors resort to memory and identity fragmentation in their representation of a group of migrants and refugees (of various nationalities) at specific geopolitical locations on the migrant route: the Spanish-Moroccan border at Melilla (Ávila Laurel) and the Romanian-­ Hungarian border (Blasim). I aim to contribute to a fresh understanding

G. Majstorovic (*) School of Arts and Humanities, Stockton University, Galloway, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Classon Frangos, S. Ghose (eds.), Refugee Genres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2_9

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of how singular literary works become inserted in transnational systems and, conversely, how transnational, and political systems are inflected by literature and art, especially through the lens of migration. On the cover of The Gurugu Pledge there is a compelling photograph taken by the Spanish photo-journalist Samuel Aranda. Depicting a small group of migrants walking, it conveys an immediate and urgent experience of dislocation and dehumanization. With only a bundle of personal possessions and carrying gallons of water, the migrants convey an urgency of displacement, while the photograph suggests a critical attitude towards image making and image consumption. Indeed, the cover of The Gurugu Pledge is purposefully dynamic: it shows an ongoing process and invites the reader to stand in and follow in the migrants’ footsteps. Ávila Laurel’s novel and Blasim’s texts deal with the immediate effects of the migrant reality of dislocation and fracture. However, by focusing on the fragment, I argue that these authors do not portray coercive migration in terms of a “migrant flow,” of an anonymous mass that has been reduced to anonymity (as in the mainstream media), but rather highlight the individual and his/her migrant story. In reading official discourse against the grain, these authors reckon with the stories of the missing and the forgotten by shifting attention to the ways migrant forms are formed: through a composition of discarded fragments and narrative gaps. I focus here specifically on two contemporary literary texts located at the gates of Europe, on the border between the Global South and the Global North. I put these transnational texts, both of which I read in English translation, into dialogue: Ávila Laurel’s novel, originally written in Spanish, was first published in an English translation in 2017; Blasim’s text appeared first in Arabic, followed by translations into English, Finnish, Spanish, and a number of other languages. I am interested in not only the transnational and postcolonial nature of their writing, but also, and more importantly, how they open lines of interconnectivity through the channels of South-South readership, resistance to neoliberal policies of surveillance, and global solidarity. In my analysis of Ávila Laurel and Blasim, I attempt to bridge discussions of migration in Hispanic and Anglophone Studies with those coming from media arts and world literature. I read both kinds of narrative through the lens of the fragment, and also investigate formal and identity rupture, and in doing so underline a poetics of dislocation that defines these texts. The potential for this kind of project, entailing an academic shift, challenges the enclosed and stagnant national approaches to literary

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study, calling into question reified, established (national) literary fields while making us rethink their diasporic and political implications. Contemporary theorists from Iain Chambers (1994) to Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2013), among others, have highlighted the migrant as discursive figure that enables us to interrogate and critique neoliberal capitalism, especially in its affirmation of the free movement of capital and limited movement of migrant bodies. By pointing to the ways in which contemporary literature is framing migrant mobilities, my aim is to critically reflect on questions surrounding not only the operations of political power and marginalization but also aesthetic form. Through my lateral and comparative readings in this essay and by putting into conversation authors from different linguistic and cultural traditions such as Equatorial Guinea and Iraq, both shaped by postcolonial history, I show how these authors actively contribute to forging a broadly inclusive South-South alliance and how forced mobility, of capital and human bodies, continues to put into question European universalism and its linear narratives of historical progress. By placing The Gurugu Pledge in dialogue with Blasim’s short story, I read the migrant fragment through overlapping narratives of dispossession, precarity, and marginalization at the gates of Global North. The uneven effects of neoliberal global capitalism, especially through its concomitant violent (military and economic) transactions, have produced and continue to produce forced migration and the involuntary movement of people. Global mobility of both capital and human bodies thus puts into question the narratives of modern reason and progress in the Western world. In my discussion of Ávila Laurel and Blasim, I therefore argue for a more historically and socially specific approach to what I would call the economy of evasion and strategic forgetting that structures and formalizes the archive of liberalism and transnational neoliberal capital flows presently conditioning migrant and refugee routes. I show ways in which both Ávila Laurel and Blasim question ethics of exploiting migrant lives as material for media consumption. To make legible the encounters and removals omitted in official media accounts of migration, I argue that migrant aesthetics require the contemporary reader/spectator to devise other ways of reading and seeing the fragment, so that we might begin to critically interrogate not only involuntary mobility in the age of unlimited global economic flows, but also contemporary remnants of empire, deepening inequalities and new forms of domination, dispossession, and subjugation, but also solidarity and resistance. Migrant

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writing extends in this sense to what I read as a geographically fluid notion of the Global South that recognizes the multi-directionality of capital flows and multiple memories that sustain their history. I argue that the migrant and refugee writing discussed here push the limits of narrative form. They convey the narrative experience of migrants through a fragment, a narrative element of shattered form. Indeed, specific histories of colonization and empire underwrite Ávila Laurel and Blasim’s texts as well as other contemporary migration literature in which dictatorships and wars ruin the economy, social inequality deepens, and migrants flee: the characters’ former lives are shattered into pieces and re-told on the move in a fragmented form.

Ávila Laurel’s Migration Novel The prolific Equatoguinean writer Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel (1966–) has been positioned within the emerging critical field broadly defined as “Global Hispanophone.”1 I address Ávila Laurel’s novel as both belonging to the critical fields of the Global Hispanophone and to the Global South, and in doing so have read the two critical fields as mutually interconnected through a shared experience of empire and colonialism. Because his novel was first published in English, I argue, however, that this text pushes the limits of the “Global Anglophone” (a term that has been used to refer to postcolonial literature from the Anglophone world). By placing his novel alongside texts of another contemporary writer who recounts a strikingly similar migrant (and postcolonial) experience, I look at overlapping stories of marginalization between these critical fields and the larger Global South, which I examine as interconnected through a shared experience of empire and colonial domination. The Gurugu Pledge begins with a clear reference to a place that dehumanizes: “We lived in the forest and cooked enough to still be standing. We gathered firewood and went down to Farkhana to buy fish, or to pretend to buy fish in the hope that some charitable soul would give us some” (Ávila Laurel 2017, 9). The narrative consists of a series of fragmented 1  If, geographically and geopolitically, the term Global Hispanophone refers to former Spanish colonies beyond Latin America and the Caribbean, the term Global South implies an entangled web of overlapping colonial histories and decolonial movements, also including Africa (Equatorial Guinea, parts of Northern Morocco, Western Sahara) and Asia (The Philippines).

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tales told by migrants seated by the campfire. With no unifying plot, The Gurugu Pledge reads like a collection of short stories transmitted first orally and then transcribed by the narrator, starting with an oral account by the migrant Peter Ngambo: “He had a beard from never shaving and he told us that in his village he’d been known as Ngambo. He said he’d once been a porter… Ngambo told us he never intended to leave his country, he’d only done so because his father had been discriminated against” (Ávila Laurel 2017, 3). Peter Ngambo is only one of the thousands of migrants gathered atop the forested mountain overlooking the border between Morocco and the port cities of Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish colonial outposts. Everyone on the mountain came from Africa, “had a past like Peter Ngambo and a brilliant future that awaited them in Europe” (Ávila Laurel 2017, 25). Migrants are awaiting the crossing, or “burning the sea,” a term that Hakim Abderrezak borrows from Arabic to describe clandestine crossings of the Mediterranean Sea, that is, the “MediterraneanMediterranean passage” (Abderrezak 2016, ix). Following Abderrezak’s Ex-Centric Migrations, I use “burning the sea” as a metaphor of migration, contact, conflict and contagion in order to interrogate multiple nodal points within the current global poetics/politics of confinement, repatriation and (un)belonging. The migrants are ironically called “the residents,” underlying the fact that they are only temporarily gathered in the Gurugu Mountain camp, on the Moroccan side of the Mediterranean shore, in a limbo, a liminal space. Indeed, the word “gurugu” is closely associated with the word “lilkhuruj,” which means “to exit” in Arabic. It is a place one hopes to exit, a mountain “exit north.” The Gurugu Mountain is the migrants’ place of temporary “residence”; located just outside Melilla, its location underscores the continuity and problematic contiguity of these spaces: the European EU border—on the soil of Africa—and the Gurugu migrant camp controlled by Morocco. A point on the migrant route northward towards Europe, the Gurugu Mountain exemplifies a multilingual space, with migrants from Mali, Benin, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, and Gambia. All of these African countries are former European colonies, as Azoulay’s documentary shows through the contested presence of their objects in European museums. The first time “Europe” is mentioned in the book, it is done so with no small dose of irony because those gathered on the mountain, the reader soon finds out, have only the present and a meager chance of entering “Fortress Europe.” Also, the migrants are divided into groups defined by

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language, for they generally also speak either French or English: “Everyone on the mountain had come from faraway places seeking a particular path” (Ávila Laurel 2017, 137). They have worked en route, “catching fish or unloading Chinese lorries in foreign lands” (Ávila Laurel 2017, 140). Different groups are allocated different caves in which to spend the night, and those proficient in multiple languages are placed on the top, in the upper part of this multilingual, Babelic mountain. The deeply disconcerting fragments that make up the aesthetics of The Gurugu Pledge point not only to the limits of linear narrativity associated with “home narrative” but also of personal identity under threat of police violence: the migrants’ precarious “home” on the Gurugu Mountain is actually located in Moroccan territory, near Nador, on a hill overlooking Melilla and the Spanish border patrolled by Moroccan police. Thus, the border of the European Union is located on African soil. A vestige of the long history of colonialism, the towns of Ceuta and Melilla are Spanish outposts, “the nearest bit of Europe to all of them” (Ávila Laurel 2017, 163). The narrator observes the remnants of Spanish colonial presence in Africa, but also gestures of local solidarity: “That they had blankets at all was only thanks to the efficient efforts of a charity based in a village in the foothills of the mountain, a village that was in fact more of a town, and which flew the Spanish flag, although it was in Morocco” (Ávila Laurel 2017, 45). The reference to the presence of the Spanish flag once again critically implies the colonial framework and the history of Spanish imperial expansion. Michael Rothberg points out that collective memories cannot simply be associated with individual identities, nor is it the case that they are formed in isolation from one another. In his conceptualization of multidirectional memory, “history is an echo chamber,” and “an ethics of memory establishes fidelity to the echoes” (2009, 224). I would argue that multidirectional memory may also serve to counter those narratives where the underlying reasons that propel the involuntary movement of migrants are disconnected from (post)colonial history of imperial plunder and conquering expeditions. Or, as Azoulay has shown through her artistic practice, the movement of migrants is a counter-expedition of sorts, of people who refuse to be separated from the world they see as their own. The migrants rely heavily on memory and storytelling. As they recall and make every attempt to remember, the stories told around the campfire make the time go faster: “there was a subgroup of people who spoke the languages of Senegal, because they were from Senegal, or had come via

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Senegal, as quite a number of people had” (Ávila Laurel 2017, 25). Their arduous journey will subsequently take them from the northernmost tip of Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar. While seated around a Moroccan campfire, someone remarks: “maybe you’re talking to the only person here who can make sure your story, and the stories of your fellow residents, will cross this sea and be told on the other shore” (Ávila Laurel 2017, 42–43). It is essential that those stories get carried across the strait. By performing the act of remembrance through storytelling, the migrant stories serve to forge multidirectional memory links between the postcolonial spaces of Africa and the future life in Europe. Mariangella Palladino reminds us, however, that these links are fragile and migrants and their stories are indeed in dire straits: “As Europe is increasingly preoccupied with maintaining, patrolling, policing, militarizing, externalizing and re-­ drawing a border in the Mediterranean, this waterway is a divisive space” (2018, 75). Soccer tournaments are also held in the migrant camp on the Gurugu Mountain, mainly to keep warm and stay occupied. The major soccer teams are from Mali, Senegal, Cameroon and Nigeria: “Anyone who came from a country with insufficient numbers to form a full team could be a substitute for whichever of the four nations they chose” (Ávila Laurel 2017, 80). The migrants who come from Niger sign up with Mali, Guineans play for Senegal and Gambians join team Nigeria. National identity, however, is only revealed on the improvised soccer pitch. In all other instances, identity is to remain hidden, and especially when Moroccan forestry police approach the camp: “the closer you got to the gates of Europe, the more you disposed of anything linking you to a concrete African country” (Ávila Laurel 2017, 90). The migrants thus hide their national identities to make it harder to be identified and deported home. One day, the four-nation soccer tournament is suspended because an incident has occurred in one of the caves on the top. Two women are not well, one having suffered a miscarriage, the other having been assaulted. They are taken down to the village, in search of a doctor, on two men’s backs. A captivating scene describing how collective frustration over this is followed by another one depicting a group storming the barbwire border fence into Melilla. As advanced in the novel’s title, hundreds of Gurugu migrants collectively pledged to climb the fence and set out to do so. The next morning, the two sick women are found on the top of the border fence where migrants had brought them in the hope that they would have been rescued and given medical help. Debarati Sanyal suggests

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“that we currently witness a convergence between biopolitical theory and humanitarian reason,” both of which “pivot upon figuring the refugee as ‘bare life’—as an apolitical, speechless victim” (2017, 5). Both humanitarian and securitarian approaches, however opposed in intention according to Sanyal’s incisive reading, “envision the irregular migrant as a body to be saved, contained, policed, moved around, encamped, kept out, or expelled; in short, as a body to be managed” (2017, 5). While the scene on top of the border fence illustrates this important point, a question posed at the beginning of Ávila Laurel’s novel is equally vexing: “Why do African stories always have to have unhappy endings?” In a manner of an epilogue that subverts this long history “of unhappy endings,” The Gurugu Pledge ends with a first-person account of a narrator who doesn’t jump the fence, but rather walks away from the camp, and abandons his quest to reach Europe. He goes instead to Gurugu Mountain’s southern face, “to the side where the lights of nearby Europe do not reach” (Ávila Laurel 2017, 182). The novel closes with the narrator’s gaze turned towards the south and the African continent. It is rather significant that he identifies as “African,” thus indicating that the novel’s closing point is about wider alliances and solidarity networks being forged, not with the legacies of Europe but with Africa. While the ending of Ávila Laurel’s novel echoes Pheng Cheah’s plea for “reworlding of the world” (the narrator has his gaze on Africa, not Europe), it acknowledges the post-migrant futurity and the space of Africa. By looking at Africa, it underscores a potential reversal of the teleological time that culminates in Western Europe and its ideal of progress.

Hassan Blasim’s Refugee Genres Hassan Blasim (1973–) is an Iraqi writer, born in Baghdad and currently based in Helsinki, Finland. He has been preoccupied with the “migrant crisis” since his own 2000 journey from Baghdad to Iraqi Kurdistan. He had studied film in Iraq and was forced to flee after stirring the anger of the regime by shooting a film in the Kurdish area. Fleeing the war, he traveled on foot through Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Hungary, via the Balkan Refugee Route. It took him four years to reach Finland, where he finally arrived in 2004: “You walked from Baghdad to Helsinki along the routes taken by clandestine migrants and you spent the worst and strangest four years of your life making your way to this Finnish paradise” (Blasim 2020, 111).

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By re-assembling the pieces of a shattered past life, Blasim writes about the devastation and trauma caused by the Iraqi wars. His acclaimed short story collections, Madman of Freedom Square (2009), The Iraqi Christ (2013), and The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq (2013), contain a story about an Iraqi ambulance driver with the title “The Reality and the Record.”2 In it, the ambulance driver, who is seeking asylum at a refugee center in Malmö, Sweden, describes being kidnapped and sold by different war factions. They all want him dead and force him to make exaggerated videotaped confessions of crimes committed by rival political groups fighting in the Iraqi war. Blasim’s narrative is filled with doubts over how to tell the stories of events he witnessed and how to convey the urgency of their tragic situations. Rather than inviting readers to suspend disbelief, however, Blasim’s visceral prose encourages us to see artifice as artifice and the raw brutality of war as war. As Rita Sakr points out, “The structure does not only mock the inadequacies of the immigration and expert interview but more radically proposes a form of dialogical storytelling that does not refrain from exposing the traumatic scars of the forcibly displaced in its architecture of vignettes and short narratives—a minimalism that persistently pushes the boundaries of its formal enclosures” (Sakr 2021, n.p.). Hassan Blasim’s work started to become widely noticed in literary circles in Finland only after its English translation appeared in the UK and after he won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014 for The Iraqi Christ. However, despite receiving grants, awards and state support for his art in Finland, Blasim to this date cannot join the Finnish national writers’ union because his identity is that of the European “other” and because he writes in another language: “Now you’re a Finnish citizen. You speak broken English that you don’t like! And broken Finnish that Finns don’t like, and broken Arabic that Arab publishers don’t like” (Blasim 2020, 111). Blasim’s short story collections and first novel God 99 (2020) are not 2  The statistics and “the record” speak of more than 5000 dead migrant bodies arriving at the shores of Europe in 2016, and over 3000 in 2017. More than 400 activists from the Spanish solidarity movement “Abriendo fronteras” arrived in Melilla in July 2017. While continuing to express solidarity with migrants, the subsequent protest site they were creating on the migrant route, in the summer 2018, was in Lampedusa, Italy.See photographs taken in Lampedusa by Daniel Castro García. His solo show titled Foreigner, held at the Wagner Gallery Space at New York University (October 2017–March 2018), coincided with Ai Weiwei’s Public Art Fund Project installations on Washington Square and throughout New York City in early 2018.

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written in classical Arabic, as preferred by publishers, but rather in a colloquial vernacular, translated into English by Jonathan Wright. A section of God 99 is titled “Did I really survive?” “Blasim’s work boldly crosses generic spaces and creative terrains in various ways,” Sakr notes, “including through a plot that consists of unconventionally structured interviews conducted by its protagonist, the Iraqi-born Hassan Owl, with mostly Arab refugees in North European cities as well as Cairo—a project for a funded art blog” (Sakr 2021, n.p). She points out the maze-­ like structure of the migrant stories comprising God 99, a novel that represents an imbrication of fiction and autobiography that includes the narrator’s own asylum-seeking journey towards Europe. The narrator says that he lived in Istanbul for a year and a half in order to make money for the next set of traffickers that would take him over to Europe. He worked in a coffee shop first, then at a bar, fishing boat, bakery, and a balloon factory. He unloaded containers of Chinese goods, and worked at a barber shop, while sleeping in public gardens and rooms shared with other migrants. After two failed attempts to cross the Turkish-Bulgarian border, he succeeded on the third and finally reached Sofia: “The second attempt was the toughest… There were about twelve of us—Iraqis, Nigerians and a young Iranian Kurdish man” (Blasim 2020, 112). They carried a Nigerian woman who couldn’t walk on their backs on a cold rainy night, following Hatim, the smuggler guide. The narrator had won the trip by beating Hatim at chess. They got lost at night and were beaten by the Bulgarian army, while the Nigerian woman was raped. He was investigated by the border patrol officers and his belongings scrutinized, including photos from his student days in Baghdad. Looking at these photos, the Bulgarian officers were amazed at seeing women in Western clothes, expecting them to be dressed in burkas, the narrator seems to suggest with no small dose of irony. The narrator’s most prized possession is a book, Mr Palomar, by Italo Calvino: “he was with me in college, at home, in restaurants, in prisons, at every border I crossed, in gardens, in the toilet, in refugee camps, in bed and even in my dreams at night” (Blasim 2020, 116). Indeed, Blasim’s novel is a multifaceted, metafictional narrative written not only about war and migration but also about books and reading. With references to Kafka, Borges, Rulfo, Mishima, Bulgakov, and Galeano, among other writers of the mostly Western canon, the narrator’s interlocutor, a key character in this novel, is translating Cioran.

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In this sense, the novel reads like a continuation of narrative strategies from Blasim’s own short stories which both acknowledge and offer an ironic distancing from the Western canon. Blasim’s knowledge of this canon is certainly deep, but there is also distance and irony here that come with the representation of war and ensuing migration, experiences that set the migrant apart and are often misinterpreted or misunderstood. While the analysis of God 99 goes beyond the scope of this essay, the end-result of this narrative strategy is a daring, self-reflexive, and experimental novel that consists of a series of fragments relating migrant lives in Western Europe. Written by an Iraqi refugee writer in Finland, this novel and Blasim’s short stories are as much about storytelling and translation as they are about migration and war. Similar to The Gurugu Pledge (although located at another EU entry point), Blasim’s short story “Why Don’t You Write a Novel, Instead of Talking About All These Characters?” from the collection The Iraqi Christ (2013) is also set on the border. Its opening scene—like The Gurugu Pledge—includes migrants gathered in a border forest. Continuing with the narrative style that Blasim has referred to as “nightmare realism,” a type of realism that follows characters fleeing war and destruction, in this scene Adel Salim and Salem Hussain are dragging “a half-naked Afghan corpse” (Blasim 2013, 91) across the Romanian-Hungarian border. The reader is introduced to the three migrants, the main “characters” from the title of this short story, their lives shattered by war into pieces. Their ironic incorporation into the title points to this text “not being a novel,” because a coherent novel depicting the lives of “these characters” is impossible to write. Next, there is a medical examination scene at a Hungarian border refugee center, with Salem going first, followed by Adel: “Then a tall young Nigerian called James… The only ones left were the Moroccan, and an old Kurdish man and his wife” (Blasim 2013, 91). Right on the first few pages, the reader meets “all these characters” that are ironically included in the short story’s title. Anisa, the Albanian, works for the refugee reception center, the “karanten,”that is “crowded with Afghans, Arabs, Kurds, Pakistanis, Sudanese, Bangladeshis, Africans and some Albanians” (Blasim 2013, 93). She has lived at the center as a refugee for five years and that is how she has become fluent in Hungarian. Adel and Salem are exposed to a series of interrogations at the nearby army post. They respond that they planned to cross the border with a professional trafficker. The plan was to enter Hungary by crossing the river

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at dawn, in a thick fog so as not to be seen: “The trafficker said he had no obligation to wait for anyone who stopped walking and we would keep going until the fog lifted. We did our best to keep up with the trafficker. We swore to the interrogators that the Afghan died crossing the river” (Blasim 2013, 93). The medical reports, however, show that he died from strangulation. The trafficker had another story, saying that he was lost and forced the migrants to spend the night in the forest. The truth was that the boat that had been arranged to take them across the river could only carry five people. So, in the middle of the night, the trafficker took the five migrants who were awake and left the remaining three (who were sleeping) behind. Those three migrants left in the forest were Adel, Salem and the Afghan, who had a raging fever and was very ill: “The poor man had stuck with us and become a companion and a brother since we met him crossing the mountains on the Iranian-Turkish border” (Blasim 2013, 94). Three years later, after the Afghan’s death at the border crossing the river, Salem is working as a translator in the refugee camp, in place of Anisa. He occasionally visits the Afghan’s grave, which is the only one without a cross in the border town cemetery. Meanwhile, Adel is imprisoned in Budapest for strangling the Afghan. When Salem finally visits him in the prison, three years later, Adel insults him and refuses to speak. He addresses his visitor, the character Salem Hussein, with the author’s name. Salem is trying to make sense of his life: “my first meeting with Adel Salim in the south of the country, our plan to escape from the military lock-up, the Iranian border guards who arrested us, the electric-shock torture, meeting the Afghan, the river, Hassan Blasim, the border” (Blasim 2013, 96). Hassan Blasim is thus identified as the translator at the border camp. The author’s name is invoked again in another meta-fictional turn (in a nod to Unamuno or Pirandello) at the end of the story, during an encounter on a train. Traveling back to the border town, a train passenger asks Salem the very question from the story’s title. He says that he has read Hassan Blasim, the author, and links Adel Salim to a character in Blasim’s story “The Killers and the Compass,” a pun on Borges’ short story “La muerte y la brújula” (“Death and the Compass”). With a playful yet poignant take on Borgesian titles in stories such as this one (or Blasim’s “A Thousand and One Knives”), the train passenger says he is certain the author will clear up the matter of the Afghan’s death in another interconnected story. Indeed, both Blasim and Ávila Laurel use macabre humor and interconnected stories not only to signal an ironic distancing from the Western

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archive of literature but also to show the shared experiences of dehumanization and precariousness at the gates of Europe. Their narratives give migrants an entirely different perspective through a re-humanized voice that allows for their stories to be heard. In fact, the narration in both texts is almost solely focused on the stories that migrants have brought with them, as their only luggage. I thus suggest that by striving to rehumanize the figure of the migrant, their texts read as poignant counter-narratives to high literary forms such as Borges’ or to media representation of migrants. Overall, while affirming free movement of capital and the so-called “global citizenship” in the post 9/11 world, it is important to note that the underlying reasons that propel the involuntary movement of migrants are either evaded or misplaced in the media but denounced and disclosed through the portrayal of migrant characters by authors such as Ávila Laurel and Blasim.

The Location of Migrant Literature Rebecca L.  Walkowitz asks us in “The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book and the Migrant Writer” to consider “that the location of literature depends not only on the places where books are written, but also on the places where they are classified and given social purpose” (2006, 527). It is interesting to note again in this regard that Ávila Laurel’s The Gurugu Pledge, although written in Spanish, first appeared in English translation, for which it won the prestigious PEN Translation Prize. The Gurugu Pledge is, in fact, Ávila Laurel’s second novel translated into English. It joins a cohort of very few Equatoguinean novels translated into this language. As Dorothy Odartey-Wellington has pointed out, “in Spain, publishers concerned with marketing objectives are reluctant to take on works that they believe are not accessible to a Spanish readership because of the themes or the type of Spanish used by ‘immigrant writers’” (2015, 203). As a result, she argues, many of those works, “often find a home only with small independent publishers” (2015, 203). This type of writing is politically engaged and boundary-crossing; its road to publishing becomes difficult because, among other reasons, it problematizes disciplinary and narrative boundaries. With reference to translation and intersections between the Global Hispanophone and the Global South, we might ask whether the “global” in Global Hispanophone is inextricably channeled through “global English,” which then paradoxically becomes the language of the Global

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South? Does the concept of the Global Hispanophone presuppose a centrifugal force, going beyond Spain and Latin America, and even beyond the spheres of the Spanish language? I would argue that, quite to the contrary, The Gurugu Pledge may be most productively read in the fissures and interstitial spaces between these terms, through which traces of migrant postcolonial subjects become visible. That is to say, the Equatoguinean Spanish in which the novel was originally written appears between the cracks and challenges our preconceived notions about writing, translation, and publishing. Furthermore, because migrants in The Gurugu Pledge also proceed from former French and Belgian colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa, what are the implications of this with regard to the French translation of this novel, for its metropolitan and, especially, its global Francophone readership? At the “Out of Africa Symposium,” held at University College Cork in September 2017, Craig Neville interviewed Ávila Laurel about the reasons as to why the original version has not been published in Spanish, to which he responded the following: “No conozco todas las razones, pero podría señalar dos. No se presta mucha atención a los negros, y sus temas en España. No hay casi negros en puestos de relevancia en España, y esto no creo que sea casualidad” [“I don’t know all the reasons, but I could point out two. Not much attention is paid to blacks, and their issues in Spain. There are almost no blacks in positions of relevance in Spain, and this I don’t think is a coincidence”] (Neville 2018, n.p.). That The Gurugu Pledge was only able to reach the global reading markets through English and French translations, and thanks not to a large publishing enterprise but a small UK press from Sheffield (And Other Stories) is indicative of the problematic positioning of Global Hispanophone writers vis-à-vis the Spanish national canon. Written against the grain of the centripetal forces of Hispanismo, the geographic and conceptual contours of Global Hispanophone show a multiple set of disentanglements from one-dimensional approaches to literature and history. However, while the Global Hispanophone challenges Hispanismo, it also entails its own internal challenges, especially with regard to specific colonial histories in its different areas. In other words, to use Global Hispanophone as one umbrella term for such diverse and distant areas as Equatorial Guinea and the Philippines may indeed transcend the disciplinary reductionism of Hispanismo but it may not fully account for the complex political and cultural realities of each area.

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Conclusion While indeed Avila Laurel’s novel has turned into a “migrant text” out of necessity, the complex dynamic of this process makes one wonder about the overall difficult place not only for a dissident writer but also for migrant text/image and its reception and distribution. It is precisely because of the critical porousness of borders and their complex postcolonial history that Ávila Laurel’s and Blasim’s migrant writing, in my view, call for such transnational literary paradigms as “Global South.” The purpose of the Global South as a critical paradigm is to contest a homogenous universalistic modernity by showing its structural connections to colonial violence: “the reworlding of the world remains a continuing project in light of the inequalities created by capitalist globalization and their tragic consequences for peoples and social groups in postcolonial space” (Cheah 2017, 194). “Global South” is therefore a term that indicates both a location/ space from where practices are seen, interpreted and recognized, but also, and more importantly, a discursive position from which theories of globalization are exposed or denounced. Blasim is not only a stateless writer who “does not belong” but also an activist and advocate for migrants’ rights. He has stated that “the movement of people across the borders is this century’s largest political demonstration” (Blasim 2017, n.p.). One of the migrants being interviewed in God 99 says that the mass migrations and the refugees that are travelling on foot to Europe are in fact “the largest demonstrations against injustice and capitalism so far this century” (Blasim 2020, 147). Blasim’s statement embodies the resistant image of a migrant as a transnational political subject whose agency and mass mobilization shows not an anonymous victim but “traces of political subjects on the move” (Sanyal 2017, 28). Although The European Commission claims that the “migrant crisis” is over, it may be argued that it is actually far from over if we pay attention to the so-called “Southern Route” (on which migrants currently go through Bosnia towards the EU border with Croatia), or the surge in migrant crossings at the Strait of Gibraltar and the Canary Islands. The uneven effects of neoliberal global capitalism, especially through its concomitant violent (military and economic) transactions, have produced and continue to produce forced migration and the involuntary movement of people. Both the subversive ending of Ávila Laurel’s novel and the final ironic twist in Blasim’s story point to the limits of literary representation while

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denouncing failed postcolonial states, dictatorship, and war as the globalizing enterprises forcing migrants to flee. Blasim’s and Ávila Laurel’s narratives expose the violence and injustice happening at the actual borders, sites of highly profitable militarization and security regimes. Their intertwined postcolonial frameworks and shared histories of oppression and exploitation expose the limits of literary form and call into question temporal boundaries between the colonial past and the neoliberal present, and in doing so, denounce injustice on and leading to the migrant and refugee routes. Acknowledgements  I would like to thank Zoë Turner from Comma Press for sending me a copy of Hassan Blasim’s novel. I would also like to thank Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel for providing answers over e-mail to my queries about The Gurugu Pledge. All shortcomings are my own.

References Abderrezak, Hakim. 2016. Ex-Centric Migrations: Europe and the Maghreb in Cinema, Literature, and Music. Indiana University Press. Ávila Laurel, Juan Tomás. 2017. The Gurugu Pledge, Trans. Jethro Soutar. And Other Stories. Blasim, Hassan. 2013. The Iraqi Christ. Trans. Jonathan Wright. Comma Press. ———. 2017. ‘This is only the beginning of the crisis’: Iraqi Author Hassan Blasim on Refugees, War and Futurism. The National. January 5. https:// www.thenational.ae/arts-­culture/this-­is-­only-­the-­beginning-­of-­the-­crisis-­iraqi­author-­hassan-­blasim-­on-­refugees-­war-­and-­futurism-­1.79602. ———. 2020. God 99. Comma Press. Chambers, Iain. 1994. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. Routledge. Cheah, Pheng. 2017. What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Duke University Press. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, Or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press. Neville, Craig. 2018. The Gurugu Pledge: Challenging the traditional translation model. Projectdart, November 15. https://projectdart.org/2018/01/19/ the-­gurugu-­pledge-­challenging-­the-­traditional-­translation-­model/. Odartey-Wellington, Dorothy. 2015. Postnational or Postcolonial? Reading Immigrant Writing in Postnational Europe: The Case of Equatorial Guinea and Spain. In Cosmopolitanism and the Postnational: Literature and the New Europe, ed. César Domínguez and Theo D’haen, 199–213. Brill Rodopi.

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Palladino, Mariangella. 2018. (Im)mobility and Mediterranean Migrations: Journeys ‘between the pleasures of wealth and the desires of the poor’. The Journal of North African Studies Special Issue: Violence and the Politics of Aesthetics: A Postcolonial Maghreb Without Borders 23 (1–2): 71–89. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford University Press. Sakr, Rita. 2021. Landscapes of Violence. Dublin Review of Books. https://drb.ie/ articles/landscapes-­of-­violence/. Sanyal, Debarati. 2017. Calais’s ‘Jungle’: Refugees, Biopolitics, and the Arts of Resistance. Representations 139 (1): 1–33. Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2006. The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book and the Migrant Writer. Contemporary Literature 47 (4): 527–545.

CHAPTER 10

“Slowly Into Darkness”: Postmemory in Alison Pick’s Far to Go and Natasha Solomons’ Mr Rosenblum’s List Mona Becker

Introduction: Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in Twenty-First-Century Novels The placeless people of the mid-twentieth century brought with them a message about the fate of rights and citizenship in a world fast spinning off its political and moral axes, that has echoed, for all that could hear, across the past eighty years to the refugee ‘crises’ of our own day. (Stonebridge 2018, 7)

The figure of the Jewish refugee from the 1930s and 1940s, fleeing from National Socialist persecution in their home country, gave birth to a “new category of person in the world: the modern refugee” (2018, 2), as Lyndsey Stonebridge puts it in the introduction to Placeless People. While Stonebridge and others question the direct transfer of the “figure of the refugee” from the very specific, European context of World War II onto

M. Becker (*) Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Classon Frangos, S. Ghose (eds.), Refugee Genres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2_10

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the contemporary political situation, this early “refugee crisis” has not only impacted on European and global refugee politics like the 1951 UN Convention but also on social and cultural responses (cf. Ahmed 2019, 153–169; Stonebridge 2018, 4–18). At the height of the so-called Syrian “refugee crisis” in 2015, for example, British public figures called on the memory of the Kindertransporte, like Rabbi Mark Goldsmith in an article for The Guardian as “part of a proud British tradition” (2015), to appeal to the nation’s humanitarianism to bring unaccompanied child refugees to Britain (cf. Craig-Norton 2019, 10). The tentative “echoes” of this past and how they impact on the literature of the postgenerations, to use Eva Hoffman’s and Marianne Hirsch’s term (Hirsch 2012, 3; Hoffman 2005, 187) in the twenty-first century are the subject of this essay. I discuss two novels from 2010, both by women writers whose families sought refuge from National Socialist persecution in Canada and England, respectively. Both novels are less concerned with recreating and retracing the events of the genocide and extermination their protagonists managed to escape from, and more with the question of “discovering what it looks like to survive, even and perhaps especially the shape that survival takes generations later” (Osborne 2015, 152). Both texts connect, in very different ways, the “shape that survival takes” in the narrative with the form of the novel itself. Natasha Solomons’ novel Mr Rosenblum’s List (2010) mediates her familial past in the fictionalized story of Jack and Sadie Rosenblum, who escape from Germany in the late 1930s with their infant daughter and try to make a new life for themselves in England. In Alison Pick’s Far to Go (2011, originally published in Canada in 2010), the contemporary narrator attempts to piece together the fate of the Jewish Bauer family in German-occupied Czechoslovakia and their son Pepik, who, like thousands of other Jewish children in the late 1930s, was brought to England as an “unaccompanied child refugee” on a Kindertransport. Pick not only questions the still dominant myth of the Kindertransporte “as a model response to a refugee crisis” (Craig-­ Norton 2019, 11; cf. Vice 2015, 267–268), but also, in the story of Pepik and the narrator’s search for their past, engages with the pain of a generation, whose memories, as Victoria Aarons puts it, “are mortgaged and beholden to a past that exists just beyond their reach” (2012, 140). Marianne Hirsch has coined the term “postmemory” to describe: the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they

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“remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.… Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. (2012, 5)1

In both novels, the (post)memory of traumatic events and how to process and relate to them, both within the narrative and as literary narrative, is a central question. While “narrative is, by its own temporality, a necessarily screened disposition” (Aarons and Berger 2017, 43), with the Shoah moving from memory into history, the question of how to remember without personal recollection has become increasingly urgent. As the editors of Memory Unbound put it in their introduction, “the question of how memories of survivors of historical traumas are transmitted to, and inherited by, members of later generations has become another area of intense inquiry” (Bond et  al. 2017, 1). This inquiry both concerns the role of memory for authors of autobiographical or fictional narratives about familial trauma and how it is transmitted through the generations (cf. Aarons and Berger 2017, 41–66), as well as how retrospective, intergenerational remembrance of and literary engagement with traumatic experiences of previous generations can contribute “self-reflexively to the power of literary space, aiming to protect memory and to facilitate belonging” (Dickow 2019, 196). Numerous novels in the twenty-first century by writers of the Jewish as well as postcolonial diasporas share such a preoccupation with the relationship between past and present and the role of narrative in establishing a sense of temporality, and ultimately, “belonging”: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2005) or Lisa Appignanesi’s The Memory Man (2004); Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005) or Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), to name just a few. Lyndsey Stonebridge points out that “[b]y the late twentieth century, literary theory recognized that the trauma of the Nazi genocide had set new terms on how literature could represent historical experience; an appreciation of the importance of testimony and of listening to the unspeakable followed, as did a new attention to the ways in which the forms of modern writing responded to history’s extremes” (2018, 8). The 1  While Eurocentric tendencies in (literary) trauma studies have been questioned and criticized in the past years (cf. Craps 2013, 9–14), the processes of intergenerational transmission of trauma and history that Hirsch discusses with regards to the Shoah can nonetheless hold relevance for other discourses regarding such experiences, a resonance she herself notes and welcomes (2012, 18; cf. Bloch 2018, 648–650).

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“impact of modern refugee history on the novel form itself” (Stonebridge 2018, 34) is reflected in the form’s growing preoccupation with ethics and politics in the twenty-first century. Attempting to engage with notions of increasing ambiguity and entanglement that come to define global politics at the turn of the millennium, the post-millennial novel “continuously emphasises the failures of language and of narrative to represent reality” (Baumbach and Neumann 2019, 3). According to Sibylle Baumbach and Birgit Neumann, a central feature of the novel in the twenty-first century is thus not only an amplified focus on issues of ethical and political responsibility (2019, 3–4), but an innovative engagement with different forms of temporality, noting that “[o]ne of the effects of the novel’s attempt to come to terms with the present moment is the imagination of new terms of temporality that disrupt the neat divisions between past, present, and future,” and continue to point out how the fusion of “past, present, and future” can “create a sense of unknown time” (2019, 5). In Natasha Solomons’ Mr Rosenblum’s List, this “attempt to come to terms with the present moment” takes the form of a fierce battle in the intimate setting of the protagonists’ relationship. The past continuously shapes the Rosenblum’s present and future—either by their holding on to it or trying to disconnect from it: The Rosenblum’s lives were divided into two—a neat line severed each half. There was the old life in Germany that was before. Then, there was the new life in England, which was after. Sadie thought of her existence purely in these terms of before and after but this left no room for right now. Her life was a blur of other times. (32)

There is still a sense of a strict division between times: Sadie is rooted firmly in her recollections of their past, Jack tries to live fully in the present, and their mostly absent daughter Elisabeth embodies an uncertain but rather hopeful future. Only during the course of the novel do these “neat lines” begin to blend. In contrast, the relationship between past and present is much more intermingled and less one-directional in Alison Pick’s Far to Go. The novel’s mostly anonymous narrator and Pepik, eventually revealed to be the narrator’s half-brother, have lived lonely and isolated lives due to their early experiences of displacement and familial loss. However, in their attempt to understand their history, they also retroactively shape the past through their memories and acquired knowledge as much as through their imagination. As a result, their interpretation of

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their family history repeatedly reveals that this history is also continuously constructed through, rather than simply conveyed to, the present. Both novels, regardless of their significant differences, experiment with “new terms of temporality,” with the implications of Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, and the changing significance of markers such as “authenticity,” “knowledge,” and “uncertainty.” While both texts, and the protagonists in them, draw on narrative and testimony, photographs and other documents in order to structure their engagement with past and present, these are no longer able to grant any real certainty about the past. The disruptive “unknown time” that Baumbach and Neumann detect in the twenty-first-century novel becomes part of an isolating and terrifying “cognitive darkness,” to use Alan Berger’s term, in Pick’s and Solomons’ novels. This postgeneration, twice removed and yet connected to the traumatic events in their family’s past, “illuminates a cognitive darkness that was not present among the survivors and their children” (Berger 2010, 151). This “cognitive darkness,” however, is not only related to memory as an omnipresent trope of this generation’s fiction, but also to the realization that their writing is no longer concerned with presenting knowledge about the Shoah and an increasing awareness about the crucial role of imagination and literary form in their artistic search for memories not their own (cf. Berger 2010, 158; Aarons 2012, 140; Osborne 2015, 152). The “cognitive darkness” can no longer be enlightened through detailed knowledge of the past, but maybe be made endurable by strengthening relationships through the sharing of memories—however blurred and imprecise—in the present.

“Construct Little Narratives”: Postmemory, Knowledge, and Uncertainty in Far to Go You came back from the dead.… I’d lost so many, but you wouldn’t leave me. You would stay. I knew, finally, that despite all the loss we were blessed. The end of this long and winding story was happy.… The others were all dead, their bodies piled up at the edge of my awareness like logs by a cabin in the woods. They had gone up in smoke. But you’d come through. (Pick 2011, 8–9)

Far to Go has a whole series of beginnings and it is not entirely discernible for the reader when the novel “actually” starts. Following the book’s epigraphs, there is a list of names and their life and death dates,

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which appear to be related to the author’s family. In a prologue, an unnamed narrator addresses an unspecified “you,” which is then followed by a letter from Lore and Misha Bauer to the English foster family of their child, with the note “FILE UNDER: Bauer, Lore. Died Birkenau, 1943” (7). In the following chapter, the narrator again addresses the unspecified “you”—later revealed to be Pepik—in the present time, describing his final moments dying from cancer. Only then follows a chapter that is clearly dated in September 1938, narrating how Misha Bauer is brutalized by Hitler Youth (11). After a few pages, however, this turns out to be a narrative within a narrative, when it is revealed that Pavel Bauer had been relating his brother Misha’s experiences to Marta (13). This rupturing of the narrative continues not only throughout the novel, but is amplified by the fact that for the largest part of the text the reader can only guess with regards to the identity of both the narrator and the “you” she addresses. As a result, the narrative itself experiences a sense of destabilization not dissimilar to the one that the protagonists go through. As Monica Osborne points out, “there are numerous moments at which we feel as if we have opened up a story midway through and are struggling to put the pieces together—as if there is a piece of information that eludes us. Indeed, a frightening sense of the unknown frames the narrative” (2015, 155). The awareness of this “sense of the unknown”—or “cognitive darkness”—connected to the lack of direct, personal memories, is a distinguishing feature of the fiction of authors who, like Alison Pick or Natasha Solomons, could be labelled the “third generation” of Shoah survivors. In her discussion of the postgeneration and literature in The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch emphasizes the significance of the photographic image for the “generations after”: “Whether they are family pictures of a destroyed world, or records of the process of its destruction, photographic images are fragmentary remnants that shape the cultural work of postmemory” (2012, 37). Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes and Georges Didi-­ Huberman, amongst others, she details the photograph’s aptitude for “truth and obscurity” (2012, 38) in both authenticating a past and simultaneously minimizing it, making it more accessible and yet creating distance (2012, 37–38). Considering Baumbach and Neumann’s discussion of the twenty-first-century novel’s uneasy relationship with “the power of narrative” and struggle “to come to terms with reality” (2019, 3), it comes as no surprise that the photograph becomes an object of great interest for the “postmemory novel.” As Hirsch puts it: “The fragmentariness and the

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two-dimensional flatness of the photographic image, moreover, make it especially open to narrative elaboration and embroidery, and to symbolization” (2012, 38). Hirsch continues to point out how the treatment and assessment of photographs in post-millennial novels like W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz or Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room (both 2001) has changed in comparison to earlier works like, for example, Art Spiegelman’s influential graphic novel Maus (1980). Noting that the image of Spiegelman’s mother in Maus “anchors and authenticates the work” (2012, 42), while the “maternal” photographs used in Sebald’s novel Austerlitz “blur and relativize truth and reference” (2012,  44), Hirsch observes that “authentication, and any concerns about it, has disappeared” (2012,  41) in the twenty-­ first-­century novels. Not dissimilar to Austerlitz, where the photograph “can at best become a measure of the character’s desire for his mother’s face” (Hirsch 2012, 46; cf. Aarons and Berger 2017, 193), familial photographs are essential to both novels considered here. Unlike the pictures in Maus or Austerlitz that are discussed by Hirsch, however, these images are not actually pictured in either novel. Like the photographs in Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room (2002, 11, 39–40, 102–105, 286; cf. Hirsch 2012, 63–67), the images are only ever described for the reader by Solomons and Pick. In Far to Go, a family picture is central to the construction of the past and the need for connectedness in belated “exile.” The portrait is introduced early in the novel by Marta, who recalls how the picture has been taken after the birth of the Bauer’s second child, who died soon afterwards, and that it was the first one to include herself (80), and is referenced in passing by Pepik decades later (189). In Prague, packing for Pepik’s upcoming journey on the Kindertransport, his mother Anneliese decides to include this picture: “It was the family portrait taken after the baby girl’s birth: Marta behind Pepik, touching his shoulders, Anneliese off to the side, her sunglasses lowered, and Pavel holding the bundle in his arms” (228). As Pepik does not even remember his sister, Marta is “surprised” by Anneliese’s choice of photograph, thinking it “confusing,” and struggles to understand the meaning of Anneliese’s remark that she included the picture “[j]ust for posterity” (228). When Pepik finally makes it to his foster family, after a catastrophic and deeply traumatizing journey, their home and family life is notably different from his known surroundings, and Pepik feels “terribly alone” (261). Even though he does not end up staying with the Millings for long, his

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short time with them will impact on the way he remembers his family and past in his new British, and later Canadian, surroundings. In a brief moment of empathy, Mrs Milling puts the family portrait on sick Pepik’s side table. Misreading the arrangement and sociocultural background of the photograph, she wrongly assumes Marta, the nanny, to be Pepik’s mother: “Mrs Milling pointed to Nanny. ‘Mother,’ she said, enunciating clearly. Pepik looked at her blankly; she said it a second time. ‘Mother.’ Marta. Mo-ther. His first English word. Mother” (265). After his brief spell with them, Pepik is sent to a Catholic orphanage, where his isolation is completed. Lying in a vast, anonymous dormitory, he muses how he had gotten there, “where he had come from” (267) and while he can still hazily remember that he had been waiting for someone at the Millings’ house, he wonders “[f]or whom had he been waiting? The people in his photo? Whoever they were, they would never find him now” (268). Decades later, when the narrator finally meets Pepik in Canada, she describes him as a man who has been deeply impacted by his experiences of loss and displacement, as someone who puts up “a small child’s charade” in his attempt to maintain a facade of normality in spite of his pain, “choosing to go through the motions of living for the benefit of the outside world” (272). As the narrator and Pepik get to know each other better, he shows her the family photograph, proudly and insistently pointing out Marta as his mother to her: “This was the one thing you knew, the thing you remembered to be true, and you weren’t about to let me take it away so easily. You pointed again to Marta” (283). When the narrator explains that Marta is not his mother, he reacts as if “given … two weeks to live: That same gape, the incomprehension” (282). The photograph, without a marker, without an explanation, and without Pepik’s own memories, had become overwritten by Mrs Milling’s misinterpretation, an ambivalent, even false, marker of Pepik’s understanding of where he had once come from, and whom he had lost. The identity of Pepik’s mother is not the only misinterpretation—or rather, misrepresentation—in this picture and its role in the narrative. While Marta describes the baby girl’s death as a tragic accident before the invasion (79–80), the narrator and Pepik later refer to her having been killed in Theresienstadt or Auschwitz (278, 285). Only towards the very end of the novel does the narrator reveal that she had actively changed the facts in her account of their family history in order to lessen the blow of the baby girl’s death: “I gave her a different death. It was just wishful thinking” (306). The process the narrator describes as “wishful thinking”

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gradually turns out to be the guiding principle not only of her entire life and career, but also of her role in the novel as well: The events I have put down here seem as likely as any others—that’s all. It was my hope, in the last year of my half-brother’s life, to construct some kind of narrative, a story for him to hang on to.… I used the letters in my possession to cobble together a version of events, arranging disparate pieces into something that seemed whole. Pepik would comment when his gut told him something had been different.… The rest we made up, taking scraps from our dreams, setting them on paper to make them make sense. (287–288)

For the greater part of the narrative, the identity of the narrator remains uncertain. She is only gradually revealed to be the daughter of Marta and Pavel, who also experienced a process of displacement and loss at an early age, which took her from a DP camp to Canada (285). While she is, therefore, herself not a direct victim of National Socialist persecution, the narrator nonetheless feels a proximity to the children of the Kindertransporte that causes her to pursue an academic career researching their fate and to throw herself into her work of collecting testimonies and stories in order to cope with her own sense of loss, losing herself “in the vastness of these stories” (141). Nonetheless, she still maintains a distance both from the subjects of her studies and from the process of sharing these stories with others, in particular the following generations. Not only does she decide against having children (220), but she has retired from her department, ignoring the secretary’s e-mails and declining to supervise a PhD student “looking for a supervisor in the field” (276–77). While the narrator presents her isolation as a direct result of her past, she nonetheless struggles with it (54). When she muses on a past love affair, she ends with the observation that the relationship was so long ago that “it might never have happened … It’s possible I’ve spent my whole life alone” (88). Similar to the “wishful thinking” that caused her to change the circumstances of the baby girl’s death in her account of their family’s fate, her retrospective position changes the depiction of her past relationships. The only connection she manages to forge is to Pepik, whom she finally looks for because she “wanted to have someone to belong to” (191) and who, despite her hopeful exclamation at the beginning of the novel that he “came back from the dead” (8), dies of cancer soon after. The narrator confesses in the final chapters that “[t]he truth is I know almost nothing about what happened in the Bauer household in the fall of

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1938 and the spring and summer of 1939” (287). With Pepik’s help, she has tried to piece together the parts of the novel that are presented as a historical narrative in an ultimately failed attempt to give the dying Pepik “some sense of completion, some resolution—even imagined—to the tragedy that opened his life” (288). This narrative twist resonates with the centrality of “re-imagination as a reaction to existential loss” (2019, 198) Dickow observes with regards to Nicole Krauss’ novel Great House (2010), as well as the general tendency of postgenerational writing in the twenty-­ first century to focus not only on “re-imagination” but also on how documentation and narrative can not only reveal, but also actively obscure aspects of the past. As a result, the writing of this postgeneration is often fragmented and destabilized (cf. Osborne 2015, 152), or, as Pick’s narrator puts it: It’s even possible to construct little narratives, to attempt to give the whole thing order. But it’s all just the memory’s attempt to make order from chaos. It is a trick of the mind, to keep it from boggling. The enormity of the loss can be too much to handle.… For my part, among all the letters I have read, there is one I always keep with me.… I could probably recite that letter by heart. And yet, I’m aware of its failure, of all the white space surrounding its words. (87)

Her attempt to give Pepik closure through narrative not only echoes the (contested) trust placed in the healing capacities of narrative-making in trauma studies (cf. Staniloiu and Markowitsch 2012, 123). The narrator’s observation “that there is healing in the telling, but there is also something that gets lost” (307) also resonates with the question whether— and how—reconciliation and recovery are possible by working through the trauma (cf. Berger 2010, 154; Osborne 2015, 156), which is a central aspect in Solomons’ depiction of the Rosenblums’ relationships.

“Cakes to Remember”: Creating and Sharing Post/ Memory in Mr Rosenblum’s List He … picked out all the currants, lining them end on end around his plate. Leaning back in his chair, he gazed at the neat row and thought of Emil. Hearing the kitchen door creak, Jack looked round to see Sadie standing behind him, her eyes bright. She leant over and rested her chin on the top of his bald head. “You remember too,” she said. “I never knew.” (Solomons 2010, 218)

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Unlike both the narrator and Pepik in Far to Go, who have only hazy or no memories of their own, Jack and Sadie Rosenblum in Natasha Solomons’ novel come to England with their memories fully in place. Upon arriving in England, Jack takes a “flimsy pamphlet” of behavioral rules for the Jewish newcomers as a literal “recipe for happiness” for how to become a “genuine Englishman” (5). He quickly leaves their home and the “safety of the East End” (7) in order to pursue his goal; Sadie, on the other hand, also takes to “recipes” to structure her new life, but in the entirely opposite direction. Soon after arriving in England, while baking her mother’s “favourite cake,” the smell of the burnt poppy-seeds causes her to pursue a “mirage” of her mother feeding ducks at a pond, “a memory flickering on the surface of the water” (273), which results in a rift between her and Jack. After Sadie walks into the pond in pursuit of her mother’s specter, Jack chides her that, “[o]dd habits are all very well for the English, but we must be invisible” (19). While he displays an assessment of the precarious situation in which the Jewish refugees found themselves in England, Sadie takes this cautious stand as a direct rejection of not only their past, cultural identity, and heritage, but also herself: “Very well. I shall be invisible” (19). She retreats from Jack into the private, domestic sphere where she can hold on to her memories as well as punish Jack for his apparent betrayal of their past (200–201). Once Jack and Sadie have achieved a comfortable economic position in post-war London, Jack aspires to the “quintessential characteristic” of becoming English—to join a golf club (21). He stakes his new identity on this final objective of Englishness; however, he soon has to realize that regardless of all his efforts to blend in, it is impossible for him to find a club that will accept Jewish members (19–30). Jack then relocates Sadie and himself to a Dorset village, where the main part of the novel follows his increasingly antic attempts to build his own golf course in time for Elizabeth II’s coronation. Even though he and Sadie are at first faced with slight mistrust and even sabotage by the villagers (50, 61, 92–97), they soon find if not friends, then at the very least gently bemused allies who become increasingly invested in Jack’s dream. While he keeps trying to fit in to the extent that he even anglicizes their family name “after hundreds of generations” (174–178), Jack’s efforts seem doomed when the local gentry and council conspire against him and thwart his entire enterprise. Broke and seemingly broken, Jack is thrown not only into utter despair but also back to his own ‘foreignness’ by this final betrayal by his beloved and admired English ‘gentlemen’ (253).

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Sadie undergoes a similar process of loss in her attempt to cope with displacement in the privacy of her home and memories. In her kitchen, she holds on to a box of memorabilia. For Sadie, this box and its contents form the guiding principle for her new life in England, just as much as his pamphlet gives both sense and structure to Jack’s desire to assimilate into his host country: That box was all that was left of before. It contained half a dozen photographs: there was one of Sadie, aged eleven, and her brother Emil, aged three, both dressed up in sailor suits as well as pictures of each of Sadie’s parents smiling at the camera.… In the box, Sadie also had a tattered Hebrew prayer book that once belonged to her grandpa, Mutti’s recipe book and a neatly folded white linen towel. Their families had been in Germany for five hundred years and that box was the sum total of their combined histories. (32)

While Jack’s attempts to create a new narrative of belonging for himself and his family take place in a London factory, clubs and pubs as well as the Dorset countryside, Sadie locates her desire to hold on to who she was and where she came from in the domestic sphere, mainly of her home and kitchen, as well as, to a certain extent, places of religious ritual and, later in the novel, her cottage garden and the village community hall. Their diverging ways of coping with both their new environment and loss also echo Lassner’s observation regarding the gendered responses of German Jewish refugees to their new situations in Eva Tucker’s fiction that “while most of the male characters adapt to change, the women absorb the cost by being consigned to unchanging domestic roles.… They are entrapped in a traditional continuity” (Lassner 2015, 202). Sadie rather proactively pursues her domestic role, in particular in the kitchen, as a way to both hold on to her memories as well as to increasingly demonstrate or even communicate her longing for her lost home in a non-verbal way through her baking and cooking. She not only connects these activities to religious practice and cultural identity—she likes “the Jewish calendar because it was all about memory” (33; cf. Staniloiu and Markowitsch 2012, 121)— but also defines her role as carrier of memory in direct opposition to Jack, who “didn’t deserve” his surviving family photographs because he “couldn’t even remember who the people were in his picture” (32). For Sadie, the act of memorialization is a lonely activity she conducts in the private setting of her kitchen, something that separates her from her

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husband and daughter for the most part of the novel, rather than bringing them closer together. Once Jack relocates the couple to their Dorset cottage, Sadie’s isolation becomes even more pronounced, away from her London acquaintances and routine. There, amidst the still slightly suspicious villagers and often abandoned in the cottage by her husband, Sadie reflects on how to connect with her past again: Once, Sadie tried writing down her memories, attempting to preserve them in a nice book to pass on to her daughter but it did not work. The meaning kept disappearing in the spaces between the words, and her story as written was never quite how she remembered it. Now Sadie wondered whether it would be better for her to cook her way home to them. (139)

Unlike Pick’s unnamed narrator, Sadie not only wishes to pass on her memories to the next generation, but also believes that this is actually possible, albeit eventually opting for a non-verbal, non-academic way of doing so by cooking “her way home.” Not unlike the narrator, however, she actively forms those memories: While the narrator in Far to Go uses knowledge, memory, and documents to “construct little narratives” that fulfil her “wishful thinking,” Sadie uses the forms of her baking and cooking to indulge and share a nostalgic memory of her family and childhood, which tends to stop short of including any memories of persecution or destruction. The re-imagined Berlin of her past is a “shetetl,” the tastes of which can be recreated using kitchen utensils and cooking ingredients—a memory assembled like the sweet layers of her Baumtorte.2 And while Pick’s narrator shies away from forming connections and sharing her memories beyond her link with Pepik, Sadie eventually bakes and cooks her way out of her isolation. With their daughter Elizabeth away at university, and Jack not only focused on his golf course but also actively misreading his wife’s renewed interest in food preparation as “a silent symbol of companionship” (159), Sadie’s cooking initially remains a solitary exercise in memory she is unable to share with her family, but which eventually becomes a tentative link between her and the village women. When Sadie, overcome by grief and loss, takes to baking an enormous Baumtorte—a cake “to help you remember” (140)—and then passes out on the kitchen floor, she is discovered by 2  I would like to thank Sheila Ghose for her observation regarding the significance of the “forms of cakes.”

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the Coronation Committee, following the smell of her cake in their search of good bakers to join them: The women ate, and it was the most remarkable cake that they had ever tasted. It was sweet and perfectly moist with a hint of lemon but, as her mouth filled with deliciousness, each woman was overwhelmed with sadness. Each tasted Sadie’s memories, her loss and unhappiness and whilst they ate, Sadie was, for once, not alone in her sorrow. (144)

In Solomons’ novel, cooking and baking becomes an almost magical way for Sadie to share the sweet and soured tastes of her “memories, her loss and unhappiness” with others. Nonetheless, her connection with the village women only goes so far. While she begins to regularly contribute her German-Jewish cakes to the committee meetings, she never stays for an English “cup of tea,” even though she begins to secretly wish that she could (158–159), and she never actively formulates her memories to share with the women. While Jack ventures out only to find himself and his dream rejected and sabotaged by the very people he wishes to join, Sadie learns that her attempts to save her memories by herself are equally doomed to fail (cf. Lassner 2015, 206; Farges 2012 189–192). When her box of memorabilia, kept in a kitchen drawer, is destroyed by snow in the last third of the novel, Sadie is thrown in an existential crisis: Her hands trembling, she lifted the carved lid. The photographs floated in water, the faces blurred and featureless, all drowned in the deluge. Sadie picked out the picture of her mother, rubbed it gently against her sleeve and held it up in the daylight. The face was gone—she had wiped it off.… She reached for the other pictures and tenderly laid them on the ground. Every one was ruined.… She sat down on the stone floor and was sick; she retched and vomited again and again until the muscles in her stomach ached. (199)

In the same kitchen where Sadie had previously turned her memories into baked goods for consumption, she now “vomits” in her terror to forget. The only way for Sadie to hold on to her murdered family had been the few photographs in this box, without which she is unable to “quite recall” their faces, as if they were “staring back at her through a bowl of water” (33). With water having destroyed the only tangible objects left of her family presumably burnt by their persecutors, Sadie leaves the ruined kitchen and goes out into the winter morning where she imagines a

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photograph of her mother on the bank of a frozen river. Trying to catch it, she ventures out to the river until “the ice cracked open and Sadie fell slowly into darkness” (203). Without her photographs, Sadie faces an existential threat to the position she has previously established for herself in that troubled and lonely space between the memories of her “before” and the English present she lives in. For her, these photographs are a direct connection to the family that she knew and lost. This differs from the equally central role of photographs in narratives such as Far to Go, where protagonists often have a more complicated relationship with these and other documents, partially because those protagonists no longer have a direct link to their subjects as Sadie does. Jack’s course of complete assimilation has been proven to be as unsuccessful as Sadie’s attempts to single-handedly preserve her family’s memory. Shaken to the core, both of them are brought out of their despair by the sense of a community of loveable and supportive misfits offered to them by the villagers—a dimension that is notably missing in Far to Go. A coalition of villagers, Jack’s golfing idol Bobby Jones, and the mysterious “woolly-pig” (276–280), save Jack’s golf course for the great game on the coronation day, while Sadie and her knowledge of “foreign food” (240) become instrumental in the preparation of the coronation chicken. In this moment, in which her being “foreign” is not considered to be something suspicious or irreconcilably opposed to her surroundings, but actually becomes an asset for the success of the quintessentially English coronation ceremony, Sadie mentions Berlin for the “first time”: “Lavender blinked, forced a tight smile and then relaxed.… Mrs Rose-in-Blum’s past wasn’t her fault, and perhaps it was better that she spoke of it from time to time” (241). More importantly, however, Sadie’s loss of her photographs and her following accident and illness cause her to forge a closer relationship with her family. She not only realizes that Jack also has memories of their lost family (218), but also connects with her daughter Elizabeth through food. In order to aid her mother’s recovery, Elizabeth learns to cook meatballs from her grandmother’s recipe. Sadie is relieved to see that “[h]istory could be carried forward in tastes and smells. Elizabeth was learning to cook from her grandmother; her children would know the tastes of the shetetl and the

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world before” (213).3 The relief Sadie feels, however, at her daughter’s final willingness to engage with her cultural heritage is partially rooted in a misunderstanding. Before Elizabeth’s return to university, the two women approach the final challenge of Elizabeth’s culinary education: the Baumtorte. Once finished, “[a]s Elizabeth bit into it she felt a wave of sadness. She considered how lonely her mother must be, to bake cakes in order to remember. It was both strange and sad, and a fat tear trickled down her cheek. Seeing her daughter cry, Sadie believed Elizabeth finally understood, and was comforted” (215). As Elizabeth eats and cries, Sadie assumes her to grieve for what she mourns too: the loss of her family, her past, a (pre-war) place and time, an entire culture that had been eradicated—and the nostalgic fiction of a “home they had to leave behind [that] was never the homogeneous safe haven they made it out to be in retrospect” (Postl 2019, 212; cf. Horowitz 2009, 49). Elizabeth, however, does not—or not directly— mourn the same past loss as her mother, but, in the more transmuted sadness of the postgeneration, instead cries for her mother Sadie in the present, for her loss and her loneliness.

Conclusion Alison Pick’s Far to Go and Natasha Solomons’ Mr Rosenblum’s List both engage with the impact of the displacement and persecution in the mid-­ twentieth century on the following generations and the question of how to translate those experiences into the novel. While both authors engage with their own family histories in their novels and both ask similar questions regarding the intergenerational transmission of memories of trauma, the “impact of modern refugee history on the novel form itself” (Stonebridge 2018, 34) takes different shapes in both texts. What is central to both novels is the relationship between past and present, the role of both memory and document in the configuration of temporality and belonging and in the creation of “postmemories” by the following generations. In Far to Go, the “white space,” the “failure” of the document is filled by reimagination. Authentication itself is problematized, and the 3  Alice Bloch also observes this relevance of food, among other stimuli, as instigator for sharing memories among contemporary families with a refugee background in England. She notes that “[c]ontext and proximity often facilitate intergenerational narratives and can be triggered by place, space, time and multi-sensory stimuli. Food, return visits, photographs … could all result in the sharing of stories and memories” (Bloch 2018, 657).

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text constantly disrupts and questions the narrative it weaves; the present actively, and ambiguously, shapes the past. Mr Rosenblum’s List appears, at least at first glance, to have both a more conventionally closed narrative and one-directional understanding of temporality. However, both the role of memory within the narrative and the form of the text are revealed to be more complicated than they first appear. While the protagonists of this novel, unlike those in Far to Go, are in full possession of their memories when they arrive in their country of exile, they are only rarely if ever discussed between and among them and their daughter. The memories that do surface, mostly in Sadie’s parts of the narrative, are positively rose-tinted. When thinking about her home, Sadie recalls her own childhood, growing up with a loving family in a “picturebook” version of the past (162, 200), and usually stops short of including events from their persecution or flight. Additionally, neither of the Rosenblums seems to really know what happened to the family members left behind when they emigrated and this obscure sense of knowingly “not-knowing” their fate is also never quite probed (16, 18–19, 201, 266). Similarly, the novel regularly sways into territories of other novelistic styles that have a—rather fantastical and fanciful—relationship with the unknown at their core: be it the near magically evocative emotional powers of Sadie’s cooking or Jack’s strange encounters with the legendary local “woolly pig” (54; cf. Lassner 2015, 206–207). In contrast to the devastating ending of Pick’s novel, in which the narrator’s loneliness is reinstated and any sense of narrative closure retroactively questioned, Solomons’ novel has a rather neat, almost fairy-tale like, happy ending, which is, nonetheless, based on the misunderstanding of memory between Sadie and her mother and the irretrievable loss of the contents of Sadie’s box and, with it, the idea of physically holding on to the concrete memories of their lives “before.” The “picturebook” ending of the one novel is thus as revealing as the “wishful thinking” at the core of the other: it is the “re-imagination” of the postgeneration engaging with their legacy of “cognitive darkness” (Berger 2010, 151) that shapes the narrative of both novels.

References Aarons, Victoria, and Alan L.  Berger. 2017. Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory. Northwestern University Press. Aarons, Victoria. 2012. The Certainties of History and the Uncertainties of Representation in Post-Holocaust Writing. Studies in American Jewish

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Literature (1981–) 31 (2): 134–148. https://doi.org/10.5325/ studamerjewilite.31.2.0134. Ahmed, Sabeen. 2019. Critiquing Agamben’s Refugee: The Ontological Decolonization of Homer Sacer. In Refugees Now: Rethinking Borders, Hospitality, and Citizenship, ed. Kelly Oliver, Lisa M.  Madura, and Sabeen Ahmed, 153–172. Rowman and Littlefield. Baumbach, Sibylle, and Birgit Neumann. 2019. The Novel: An Undead Genre. In New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel, ed. Sibylle Baumbach and Birgit Neumann, 1–17. Palgrave Macmillan. Berger, Alan L. 2010. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and Identity in Third Generation Writing about the Holocaust. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 28 (3): 149–158. https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.0.0453. Bloch, Alice. 2018. Talking About the Past, Locating It in the Present: The Second Generation from Refugee Backgrounds Making Sense of Their Parents’ Narratives, Narrative Gaps and Silences. Journal of Refugee Studies 31 (4): 647–663. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fey007. Bond, Lucy, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen. 2017. Introduction: Memory on the Move. In Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies, ed. Lucy Bond, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen, 1–26. Berghahn Books. Craig-Norton, Jennifer. 2019. The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory. Indiana University Press. Craps, Stef. 2013. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137292117. Dickow, Sonja. 2019. Architectures of Absense: Nicole Krauss’ Novel Great House. In Passages of Belonging: Interpreting Jewish Literatures, ed. Carola Hilfrich, Natasha Gordinsky, and Susanne Zepp, 194–208. De Gruyter. Farges, Patrick. 2012. ‘What Church Do You Go To’: The Difficult Acculturation of German Jewish Refugees in Canada, 1933–2004. In Beyond the Nation? Immigrants’ Local Lives in Transnational Culture, ed. Alexander Freund, 187–210. University of Toronto Press. Goldsmith, Mark. 2015. “In the spirit of the Kindertransport we want to extend a warm welcome to Syria’s refugees.” The Guardian, July 08, 2015. https:// www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-­network/2015/ jul/08/in-the-spirit-of-the-kindertransport-we-want-to-extend-a-warmwelcome-to-­syrias-refugees Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia University Press. Hoffman, Eva. 2005. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. Public Affairs. Horowitz, Sara R. 2009. Nostalgia and the Holocaust. In After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture, ed. R.  Clifton Spargo and Robert Ehrenreich, 41–58. Rutgers University Press.

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Lassner, Phyllis. 2015. Jewish Exile in Englishness: Eva Tucker and Natasha Solomons. In The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction, ed. David Brauner and Axel Stähler, 199–209. Edinburgh University Press. Osborne, Monica. 2015. Representing the Holocaust in Third-Generation American Jewish Writers. In The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction, ed. David Brauner and Axel Stähler, 149–160. Edinburgh University Press. Pick, Alison. 2011. Far to Go. Headline Review. Postl, Gertrude. 2019. The Origin That Never Was: The Loss of Heimat and New Beginnings. In Refugees Now: Rethinking Borders, Hospitality, and Citizenship, ed. Kelly Oliver, Lisa M. Madura, and Sabeen Ahmed, 211–225. Rowman and Littlefield. Seiffert, Rachel. 2002. The Dark Room. Vintage. Solomons, Natasha. 2010. Mr Rosenblum’s List or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman: A Novel. Sceptre. Staniloiu, Angelica, and Hans J. Markowitsch. 2012. Dissociation, Memory and Trauma Narrative. Journal of Literary Theory 6 (1): 103–130. https://doi. org/10.1515/jlt-­2011-­0012. Stonebridge, Lyndsey. 2018. Placeless People: Writings, Rights, and Refugees. Oxford University Press. Vice, Sue. 2015. British Jewish Holocaust Fiction. In The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction, ed. David Brauner and Axel Stähler, 267–278. Edinburgh University Press.

CHAPTER 11

Responding to Refugee Children: Transfigurations of Genre and Form in Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends and Lost Children Archive Chinmaya Lal Thakur

According to the activist-thinker Harsha Walia, regulation of national and international borders by nation-states globally is much more than an administrative necessity. Rather, it is a kind of territorialization—controlled and systemic organization of spatial limits by national governments—that implicates global histories and contemporary practices of (neo)imperialism, dispossession, and racism. It is this territorialization that Walia terms border imperialism. Further, she identifies four overlapping structures that underlie border imperialism. These are: first, the securitization of borders by countries whose imperialist and capitalist policies force people to move in the first place; second, the criminalization of migrants by governments that leads to individuals and groups being declared “alien” or “illegal”; third, racialization and entrenchment of hierarchy in

C. L. Thakur (*) La Trobe University, Bundoora, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Classon Frangos, S. Ghose (eds.), Refugee Genres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2_11

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national-belonging and citizenship in countries that the migrants seek to enter; and, fourth, the exploitation of migrant labor by capitalist interests with the mediation and support provided by the nation-state into which some migrants may be able to enter (Walia 2013, 9–11; cf. Walia 2021). This chapter reads Valeria Luiselli’s writings in English—the non-­ fictional account Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017) and the novel Lost Children Archive (2019)—as undertaking the critique of border imperialism through complex negotiations with commonplace conceptions of genre and form. The chapter has been divided into four sections. The first part deals critically with teleological form and supposedly universal genre in narrative fiction. The second section of the chapter underlines the way Luiselli subverts border imperialism in Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions in terms that are direct as well as modulated and subtly presented through transformative engagements with genres and forms like the story, the essay and non-fiction. The third section undertakes a parallel reading of Lost Children Archive by highlighting the manner in which the novel’s narrative undercuts readerly expectations from genres and forms such as the documentary, the elegy, and the road novel. The section also emphasizes the key role that children play in the text in terms of providing an alternate point of narration as well as action. The concluding part of the chapter explores how thinking about the political relationship between children and nation-states can help us understand the politico-ethical implications of the actions of the children in Luiselli’s novel. This section also demonstrates how Lost Children Archive undoes the form of the novel itself by making its readers consider the parallel between the children in the text and the work that Luiselli herself undertakes as its author.

I In most commentary on contemporary narrative fiction, especially the novel, critics prefer genres and textual structures that enclose the stories of their various protagonists.1 In terms of form, the analytical enclosure of the textual occurs the moment the critic takes a retrospective glance at what he or she has finished reading. What distinguishes a novel’s plot from its form, as the noted critic James Wood reminds us, is the fact that the 1  Walia’s border imperialism can be said to be mirrored in literary criticism that values the enclosure of character in genre and form.

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latter is a retrospective understanding. The reader, in other words, is mindful of the novel’s plot while following its narrative. Only once the reading is completed, however, does he or she begin to consider its form. In Wood’s words: … plot is reading, form is literary criticism. Form is what we are left with when plot is no longer manipulating us, but when we—as readers, as critics—are manipulating plot. The plot of Anna Karenina is all the events and occurrences that lead to Anna’s eventual death. The form of Anna Karenina is the finished story about the woman who committed adultery and who is finally punished—sacrificed—for that mistake. This is the punitively judgmental form of all the major nineteenth-century novels of adultery: the woman errs, the woman must die. (Wood 2018, 162–163)

As highlighted by Joseph R. Slaughter, it is the genre of the Bildungsroman, the story of an individual’s coming of age, that makes it possible for the form of the novel to emerge alongside universal(ist) conceptions of human rights. The story of the growth or education of the individual, in other words, becomes the structural and grammatical way in which the plot of the novel as well as humanist narratives of freedom and self-discovery develop and achieve fruition in the twentieth century. Put differently, the Bildungsroman becomes the means through which readers of such texts enclose its possibilities after reading—as if to suggest that coming-of-age is the only logical and most desirable conclusion to their narratives (Slaughter 2009). In contrast to the impulse in most literary analysis and criticism to enclose the contemporary novel in terms of some specific form and genre, James Wood suggests that readers of narrative texts in general and novels in particular need to be mindful of the way “form” behaves as if it is free of any social, political, or aesthetic pressure. The autonomy of form, for Wood, comes precisely at the moment when it performs its function of enclosure. By enclosing, by in-forming that which is the lives of people (in fiction), form creates an autonomous hurdle to what can get prolonged endlessly. It, therefore, encloses representation but does so in a manner that allows the readers of novels to consider the (dis)similarity between human lives and their representation in fiction (Wood 2018, 164–166). And, the moment one considers form as simultaneously enclosing and interrupting the fictional representation of human lives, one realizes that form in itself is (in) becoming in such moments. Or, as Henri Focillon

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describes in the context of the evolution of modern art, form can be said to mark the beginning of change. Focillon goes on to suggest that forms are composed by the transformative interactions that a particular work of art brings into play. These could be authorial or readerly inclinations, affects, intentions, or purposes. Hence, form encompasses all conscious and unconscious activities that bring any work of art to life for its audience. Put differently, form is not what is already there or given. Rather, it is the metamorphosing potential of all art that manifests in the moment of its becoming (Focillon 1992, 40–42). The discussion in the subsequent sections will underline how Luiselli’s writings in English—Tell Me How It Ends and Lost Children Archive— undertake a critique of border imperialism, not just in political terms, but also in concomitant aesthetic and ethical terms.

II The figure at the core of Valeria Luiselli’s writings in English is the refugee child, specifically the unaccompanied children who attempt to cross over the border of the United States through Mexico even as they endure terrible circumstances in the process. Trying to escape repeated cycles of violence, oppression, crime, and poverty, most of them come from the so-called “Northern Triangle” (made up of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) and make desperate efforts to traverse the Sonoran Desert between Mexico and states in the US like Arizona and California. By depicting the excruciating troubles that such children endure, Luiselli’s texts Tell Me How It Ends and Lost Children Archive resist border imperialism. In Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli’s articulation echoes Walia’s argument about recognizing and resisting the workings of border imperialism. Here, Luiselli suggests that the US government needs to accept and address the truth that problems plaguing Central American countries have been the consequence of US policies and actions. Hence, she argues for the acknowledgement and recognition of the problem of the refugee children as being hemispheric in dimensions, instead of the situation being continuously represented as that of one nation-state attempting to deal with children who turn up at its borders in great numbers for reasons that it has nothing to do with. Luiselli writes:

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It would surely be a step forward for our governments to officially acknowledge the hemispheric dimensions of the problem [of refugee children], acknowledge the connection between such phenomena as the drug wars, gangs in Central America and the United States, the trafficking of arms from the United States, the consumption of drugs, and the massive migration of children from the Northern Triangle to the United States through Mexico. No one, or almost no one, from producers to consumers, is willing to accept their role in the great theatre of devastation of these children’s lives. To refer to the situation as a hemispheric war would be a step forward because it would oblige us to rethink the very language surrounding the problem and, in doing so, imagine potential directions for combined policies. But of course, a “war refugee” is bad news and an uncomfortable truth for governments, because it obliges them to deal with the problem instead of simply “removing the illegal aliens.” (Luiselli 2017, 86–87)

The forthright way in which Luiselli calls for governmental acknowledgement and changes in policy does indeed resonate with Walia’s concerns about border imperialism. The rest of the narrative of Tell Me How It Ends, however, modulates her response to the problem of refugee children in a manner that is subtle and indirect in comparison. She does not propose “solutions” to the issue but presents complex glosses on the situation by undertaking a self-conscious and innovative approach to questions of genre and form in the text. A paradox rests in the very title of Luiselli’s non-fictional account of the lives of unaccompanied and undocumented children who seek to enter the United States. The title’s first part, “Tell Me How It Ends”, is the imperative that the author’s young daughter places on her when relating the disturbing stories of refugee children seeking asylum and even citizenship in the United States. The demand, “Tell me how it ends, Mamma”, is therefore not to be taken as the mere insertion of the author’s “real” and personal life into the text, but rather as the instinctive need for human beings to be told the (happy) endings of stories. Luiselli’s daughter, in other words, demands of her mother that the journeys of refugee children from their homes in the countries of the Northern Triangle to the United States must be ones of progress and fulfillment wherein one landmark should lead easily to the next destination. As Luiselli reveals, the expectation expressed through the imperative “Tell me what happens next” could not be farther from the truth as most children have traumatic and life-­ threatening experiences during the journey that ultimately does not even bring them to the Mexico-US border (Luiselli 2017, 90). The children,

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for example, attempt to reach the border aboard the La Bestia—dilapidated freight trains that cross Mexico. As there is no provision of passenger services, they ride atop the trains and risk grave injury and even death. To make matters worse, the La Bestia are often raided by smugglers, policemen, soldiers, and thieves who demand sexual favors, food, and valuables from the children. Consequently, by the time the children get to the Sonoran Desert which is to be traversed on foot, they have literally nothing to survive on. Unsurprisingly, most of them die in the desert and their remains lie buried in the sand for a terribly long time (Luiselli 2017, 19). The subtitle of Luiselli’s text, “An Essay in Forty Questions”, does not sit well with the first part for the usage of the words “Essay” and “Questions”. Any essay, as Claire de Obaldia argues in the magisterial study The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism, and the Essay, is expected to contain narratives but these are usually brief, in the nature of the exempla. Such short narrative pieces in the essay are meant to educate (as in Essais by Michel de Montaigne) or entertain (like in modern essays), but never to cater to the demand of being provided with the whole story, the entire narrative as such (de Obaldia 1995, 3). Consequently, an essay cannot be the adequate or appropriate response to the demand for a full-­ fledged narrative, to questions about what happens next. Similarly, “questions” is a problem not only because it is an apparently illogical response to the demand for a complete story but also because the genre of the essay is not supposed to be worked out by the writer through a series of interrogations—forty in number, in the case of Tell Me How It Ends. As John Frow underlines, the genre of any text is inextricably associated with the audience’s expectations. In literary cultures, for example, readers pick up works with an anticipation of what is to come. And, a large proportion of their assumption is constituted by the genre to which they take the work to belong. Their guess, in the first place, is a consequence of “cues” or “paratexts”, in other words, metacommunication enabled by external sources such as advertisements and conversations with friends and teachers as well as their own experiences of reading (Frow 2006, 104–105). By utilizing paradoxes, poignant irony, and contradiction in the narrative of Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli therefore subverts the expectations of readers from the genres of the story and the essay. In the process, she also lends the apparently non-fictional text with affective charge throughout, a charged intensity with the potential to disturb how the problematic of

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undocumented and unaccompanied refugee children is understood in the United States and Mexico as a whole. Luiselli presents Tell Me How It Ends as being constituted by moving and expressive responses drawn from the lives and journeys of refugee children to the forty questions asked by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. The author has access to the stories of the children as she has worked as a translator and interpreter for the detained children as well as their “illegal” relatives who stay mostly undocumented in the country. Part of the response to question number seven, “Did anything happen on your trip to the US that scared you or hurt you?”, for example, is as follows: … as a Mexican, this is the question I feel most ashamed of, because what happens to children during their journey through Mexico is always worse than what happens anywhere else. The numbers tell horror stories. Rapes: eighty percent of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the US border are raped on the way. The situation is so common that most of them take contraceptive precautions as they begin the journey north. Abductions: in 2011, the National Human Rights Commission in Mexico published a special report on immigrant abductions and kidnappings, revealing that the number of abduction victims between April and September 2010—a period of just six months—was 11,333. Deaths and disappearances: though it’s impossible to establish an actual number, some sources estimate that, since 2006, around 120,000 migrants have disappeared in their transit through Mexico. (Luiselli 2017, 25–26)

Here, despite the presentation of facts and figures about rapes, abductions, deaths and disappearances—“matter” characteristic of the non-­ fictional which is often assumed to be informative and factual—the text subverts the form of non-fiction itself. The non-fictional text, as Jonathan Culler asserts, “is usually embedded in a context that tells you how to take it: [like] an instruction manual, a newspaper report, a letter from a charity” (Culler 1997, 31). Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends, in contrast, disturbs its readers as they are not sure as to how they should take an innovative, apparently non-fictional work which expresses pain, grief, horror, empathy, and even solidarity with the refugee children, its supposed “subject matter”. Such disturbance is the result of Luiselli’s investment of the personal into the apparently objective and neutral form of the non-fictional. In this quotation, for example, Luiselli does not just tell her readers of the

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experiences of the refugee children in a matter-of-fact manner. Rather, she brings her own Mexican identity into the picture, an identity that is rightly embarrassed and ashamed at what is done to the refugee children within the borders of the nation-state that it identifies with. The political identity of the nation-state itself then gets modulated as it is forced to acknowledge and respond to an intermeshing of the personal with the official, legal, and technical. The text, thus, undoes the form of the non-fictional by exposing it as incapable of containing the various significations, associations, and inscriptions that Luiselli makes it desperately hold on to. The non-fictional, in other words, gets registered in the work precisely at the moment of its metamorphosis, the moment when it ceases to remain non-­ fictional and becomes something else. Form in Luiselli’s work then, in line with Wood’s and Focillon’s suggestions discussed in the first section of this chapter, can be said to mark the beginning of change. It is paradoxically, put differently, that which gets inscribed only in the moment of its transfiguration and transformation. Luiselli began writing Tell Me How It Ends after having begun to write the novel Lost Children Archive. She felt however that the novel was shaping up to have a rather palpable and overstated characteristic and risked being read as a political manifesto about the lives of refugee children who struggle to make it across the Mexico-US border. Such sentiments, according to her, were more appropriate for a non-fictional work like Tell Me How It Ends. After completing Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli thus returned to writing Lost Children Archive to offer, in her own words, “more open questions and open ends instead of political instances that are too loud and obvious by themselves” (Leon 2019). Despite its subversions of the genres of the story and the essay and the form of the non-fictional, the text indeed appears to have a journalistic gaze towards the refugee children. It appears, for example, to maintain a sensitive but strict difference between the author’s own situation of waiting for green cards for her family and herself and the crisis of the refugee children at the borders. Luiselli is certainly moved by the circumstances of the minors seeking refuge in the country that is also alien to her but a sense of distance, of sterile aloofness, and of cold otherness between them continues to persist in the writing. She herself appears to attest to the distinction between the absolute vulnerability of the refugee children and the relatively secure situation of her family and herself when she asserts:

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The green card application is nothing like the intake questionnaire for undocumented minors. When you apply for a green card you have to answer things like “Do you intend to practice polygamy?” and “Are you a member of the Communist Party?” and “Have you ever knowingly committed a crime of moral turpitude?” And although nothing can or should be taken lightly when you are in the fragile situation of asking for permission to live in a country that is not your own, there is something almost innocent in the green card application’s preoccupations with and visions of the future and its possible threats: polyamorous debauchery, communism, weak morals! The green card questionnaire has a retro kind of candor, like the grainy Cold War films we watched on VHS. The intake questionnaire for undocumented children, on the other hand, reveals a colder, more cynical and brutal reality. It reads as if it were written in high definition, and as you make your way down its forty questions, it’s impossible not to feel that the world has become a much more fucked-up place than anyone could have ever imagined. (Luiselli 2017, 10)

In its analysis of the text, the present chapter pays attention to the problem of openness that Luiselli underlines by considering the experiments she undertakes with regard to aspects of genre and the novel form. It demonstrates that such innovations lead to implications that are not only radical when compared with Tell Me How It Ends but also affirm the status of the novelistic (and the literary) as the site of affective, aesthetic, and expressive undoing of border imperialism. The following discussion in the chapter therefore gestures towards nodes in the narrative of Lost Children Archive that inscribe within themselves both aspects of the problem—of writing about refugee children, and of writing about writing about refugee children.

III Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive has a family of four—Mama, Papa, the boy, and the girl—take a westward road trip of almost two and a half thousand miles from New York to Arizona. Papa, who drives their car throughout the journey with Mama giving him company in the front passenger seat, is who the family calls a “documentarian”, a librarian of sorts who searches for sounds—records, stores, and ultimately arranges them in a manner that the sounds would tell a story (Luiselli 2019, 99, 192). His interest is in recording the sounds associated with Apache history and territory, especially those linked with last Apache leaders such as Chief Cochise,

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Geronimo, and the Chiricahuas. Given the painful and tragic memory of the last moments of the Apache leaders like Geronimo and the fact that their histories have more or less been erased from national(ist) remembrance in the United States, Papa’s inclination is to produce an “inventory of echoes” that would serve as the inscription of the “ghosts” of the last Apaches. (Luiselli 2019, 21) Hence, the family makes the trip from New York to Arizona, the latter state being the place whose southeastern boundaries housed the heart of the Apacheria—the Chiricahua Mountains—in history. Mama, in contrast to Papa, is not interested in recuperating the resonances of a lost past for the present in terms of memory and remembering. Her concern is firmly situated in the present even as the past for her is something that speaks with the tendencies of the contemporary. She is therefore not a documentarian but a “documentarist”, someone who like a chemist is inclined towards “pragmatic storytelling, commitment to truth, and a direct attack on the issue” (Luiselli 2019, 99). On the way to Arizona, Mama’s friend Manuela informs her about the disappearance of her two daughters. The girls, who had “illegally” crossed into the United States and were seeking asylum, had been detained in New Mexico. They were to be deported after being shifted to another detention center in Arizona. However, like thousands of other undocumented children, they get lost as they never returned to their uncle who waited for them at the airport in Mexico City for eight hours. Mama’s project in Lost Children Archive is therefore to record the stories of lost refugee children and then arrange them in a way that would speak to those like her own young children. Much like the way she undercuts the genres of the story and the essay in Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli subtly unsettles commonplace notions of the documentary in Lost Children Archive. As Bill Nichols reminds us in his well-known work, Introduction to Documentary, what the form takes as its credo is the creation of an aesthetic of authenticity and witnessing. The readers and viewers of documentaries engage in an economy of apparent truth-telling as the documentary relies on official documents or pictures and interviews with people involved in specific events in the past. There is, in other words, a tendency in the documentary to make the past come alive for its readers or viewers in the present (Nichols 2001, xiii–xiv). In Luiselli’s novel, Papa believes that inscriptions of the lived past of the last Apaches can be recovered from the sounds present in the erstwhile Apacheria. The novel thus raises the question if the past can be

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documented in non-material inscriptions, entities that can be connected with the past only if their audience is willing to take an imaginative leap as they do not allow for any witnessing as such to occur. Similarly, in Mama’s desire to document the stories of lost refugee children, Lost Children Archive asks if it is at all possible to record the voices of those who have been lost forever. Mama may be able to reach the relatives of the lost children but she will never have access to the latter’s narratives as such. Consequently, the question that the novel presents for its readers is this: if the lost past can and must be recovered, can it be done in a way that it does not get re-presented through the voice of someone it did not belong to? The documentarist in Mama, however, is forced to yield to the powers of the affective, of the emotionally charged and intense, when she encounters the little red book by Ella Camposanto titled Elegies for Lost Children. The book, actually a fictional creation by Luiselli, is presented in the narrative of Lost Children Archive as dealing with the Children’s Crusade—an event during which thousands of children are supposed to have travelled across and beyond Europe around the year 1212. Referring to terms immanent to Luiselli’s novel, the book provides a way for Mama to have her own archive of the lost refugee children. She reads the elegies in the book and records the readings as she feels almost an uncanny resonance between the children who moved during the Crusade and the children who get lost while trying to enter the United States from Mexico. What convinces her about Camposanto’s elegies as being capable of traversing the almost eight-hundred-year-long temporal gap between the contemporary refugee crisis and the Crusade is the remarkable similarity of the journeys of the children in their respective times and spaces. The following is the description of the children in the Crusade atop freight carriages which Camposanto calls “gondolas”, for example, and their resemblance with the La Bestia in the refugee crisis is indeed striking. ([from] The Fifth Elegy) Long vines hung from low branches, brushed their cheeks and shoulders. Sitting or lying down, aboard the leprous roof of a gondola, they crossed acres of tropical jungle, where they had to be vigilant of men, but wary also of plants and beasts. Even the train crawled more slowly than usual here, as if it too were cautious not to stir the undergrowth awake. Mosquitoes covered the seven of them in pink-welts that later turned bruise-purple, later brown, and then vanished but left behind all their dengue poison.

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The jungle was lightless and full of hidden horrors. It choked them with the longing to escape but offered them no foreseeable relief. Their heads filled with heavy air and fever. The colors of the jungle, its fetid vapors, ignited their open eyes with wild visions. Nightmares flowered in all their dreams, filled them with humid tongues and yellow teeth, and the big dry hands of older men. One night, sleepless and shivering despite the heat, their bones rattling, they’d all seen it, the fleeting silhouette of a body hanging from a rope strung to a branch… (Luiselli 2019, 198)

It is indeed the way in which Camposanto’s elegies about the children in the Crusade differ from what one conventionally takes the genre to be about that the readers of Luiselli’s novel can register the import of Mama’s transformation from documentarist to archivist. As Jahan Ramazani explains in his study Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, the elegiac is not only usually expressed in verse but it conveys the eruption of melancholia at the passing of a loved one (Ramazani 1994, ix-xi). The above quotation from Lost Children Archive reveals that the novel’s narrative, in comparison, describes the journeys of the Crusading children as if they are concomitant with the time in which the readers go through the passage. Yet, the tone of the description is elegiac and foreshadows the deaths of most of them. Hence, the readers of Camposanto’s elegies in Luiselli’s novel get the sense that they are privy to the slow and excruciatingly detailed unfolding of the inevitably tragic ends to the journeys of the children in the Crusade. Unsurprisingly, Mama wants to archive such moments, moments of herself reading the elegies, as she comes to believe that the elegies are the only way for her to not only witness the last moments of the lives of the lost refugee children but also be as close as possible to them during such a time. In this way, Luiselli (for) herself seems to be able to narrow down the rather sterile distance that had ultimately persisted between herself and the refugee children in Tell Me How It Ends. In terms that transcend the immediate context of the narrative of Lost Children Archive, it is noteworthy that Luiselli’s strategy of positing the documentarian Papa against the documentarist and archivist Mama establishes resonances between and among the last Apache leaders, the lost refugee children, and their own children. Mama, the novel’s narrator in the first part, for example, repeatedly refers to the “backseat games” that the boy and the girl play in the car. In these games, the children usually enact their imaginations of Apache struggles against “white eyes” and

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sometimes they even pretend to have become refugee children who attempt to cross the Sonoran Desert to get into the United States. Mama knows that the games are “irresponsible and even dangerous”, for the boy and the girl hardly know anything about the last Apaches or the children lost in the desert and have merely picked up a few things from when their parents discuss their projects or tell stories (Luiselli 2019, 155). Yet, she appreciates how the children “combine and confuse” the stories of “the last of the Chiricahuas” and “the child refugees at the border” to generate “possible endings and counterfactual histories” (Luiselli 2019, 75). Actually, she gets slowly convinced by the belief that any understanding of the past, especially historical understanding, “requires some kind of reenactment of the past”. Hence, her children’s backseat games and reenactments become for her “the only way really to tell the story of the lost children” as they have the power to dissolve “the rational, linear, organized world”, to “break the normality of that world, tear the veil down, and allow things to glow with their own, different inner light” (Luiselli 2019, 179–180). Interestingly, the boy and the girl do “really” reenact the painful last moments of the Apache leaders as well as the lost refugee children by running away from the hotel in which the family is staying towards the end of the trip. They leave a note for their parents that suggests that they have gone to look for Manuela’s lost girls in the desert and will ultimately make their way towards Echo Canyon, near the Dos Cabezas and Chiricahua Mountains, to meet them. In the process, unsurprisingly, they not only struggle to meet their own basic needs such as food, sleep and safety, but also struggle to keep each other’s company and find their way to Echo Canyon. The decision of the eleven-year-old boy and the five-year-old girl (who is actually coaxed into leaving by her brother) to live through the experiences of the lost children in real terms by traversing the desert in search of Manuela’s daughters presents a strange and yet powerful gloss on the problem of refugee children. By going through what they have to endure, the boy and the girl not only traverse the imaginative gap that remained between children detained by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services and the author of Tell Me How It Ends, but also move beyond the intimations of affect and empathy that reading from Elegies for Lost Children provides to Mama. In vocabulary appropriate to children of his age, the boy calls the experience “[being a] documentarianist”, in his mind (occupying) a position that encapsulates the respective documentarian and documentarist inclinations of his parents. In itself, the

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narrative of Lost Children Archive certainly attests to the boy’s assertion— not only is its second part called “Reenactment” but also because almost half of it is told from his perspective. Moreover, the “text” of the boy’s telling is presented as a series of voice-recordings that he makes for the girl to grow up and listen to. And, it is followed by a cluster of polaroid images that he takes throughout the trip using the camera gifted by his parents on his birthday. The recordings entail the boy becoming a documentarist for his sister while the pictures imply that he is a documentarian and archivist for her as well.2 When the reader goes through the entire narrative of Lost Children Archive, it becomes clear to him or her that the novel may have been structured like conventional tales of the road—both novels and cinematic stories—but is surely unlike most of them. In fact, much like the elegiac mode, the novel undercuts its readers’ expectations from and associations with the genre of the road novel. As critics such as Ann Brigham and Ronald Primeau underline, the road narrative has usually been the means for the expression of midwestern subjects, themes, and views. Prominent examples include Jack Kerouac’s affinity for Chicago blues, the Iowa Pooh Bear, and cornfields in On the Road (1957) and Robert M. Pirsig’s hint about midwestern “nowhereness” being the key ingredient in the American experience of Zen peacefulness in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). Additionally, the critics argue that the midwestern region is presented in these narratives as a place for “wholesomeness, friendliness, and paradoxically meditative motion”, as a place “to slow down, to capture lost values and ways of life, and to regroup, recharge, and sort out the complexities of the quest” (Primeau 2013, 1–2). In her reading of American road literature, Ann Brigham astutely highlights that typical examples of the post-World War II road narratives such as On the Road, John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1961), and John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charlie: In Search of America (1962) configure mobility in the Midwest as an exclusively masculine and white experience, as an experience that frees the individual white male from structures of 2  The boy’s gesture of leaving the recordings and the images for perusal by the girl in the future makes Patricia Steulke contend that Lost Children Archive can be read as an “archive novel” i.e., “a novel that explicitly styles itself as an archive, and exposes novel writing as a curatorial practice of research and imagination, laying bare its sources (even as they double as the product of the characters’ own research and archival practices), less to offer persuasive evidentiary authority (though perhaps that is part of the solidarity project of the novel), and more to acknowledge the incompleteness of any representational project” (Steulke 2021, 44).

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contemporary life that otherwise circumscribe and inhibit his existence and render him immobile (Brigham 2015, 13–14). By contrast, Lost Children Archive disrupts the conventions associated with the genre of the road novel. None of the four members of the family at the center of the novel’s narrative feel, for example, that the end of their journey brings any simplicity and innocence (back) to their lives. Instead of the trip proving to be a quiet, contemplative meditation as is the wont of conventional road narratives, their travels force them to consider circumstances outside of themselves, situations of others like the Apache leaders who have been erased from national(ist) histories and that of the refugee children who get lost in the Sonoran Desert and perish at the border between Mexico and the United States. The narrative point of view in the novel, moreover, is largely focalized through the perspective of Mama—an individual whom the novel does not name but indicates as not being an American citizen by birth. Even when the boy tells the story in the second half of the novel, the narrative does not provide any sense of calm, relief, or comfort to its readers. In fact, in the concluding section of the third part of the novel titled “Echo Canyon”, the boy’s narration is not punctuated at all. There are neither any breaks in the sentence nor in the paragraph. For about twenty pages in the novel, therefore, readers “witness” the boy speaking without breaks. As he cannot afford to even take a breath in describing everything for his sister’s reference in the future, the readers must also follow the relentless and uninterrupted rhythm of his articulation. In the following section, the chapter makes concluding statements that underline the fact that it is children in Luiselli’s novel that respond to the histories of the Apaches as well as to the pains endured by the lost refugee children by reenacting them.3 It reflects briefly on the problem that Luiselli’s creative gesture entails—the problem of imagining a relationship between children and politics in such a way that would not rob the young of the right to imagine their own futures.

3  It is worth remarking that in their essays, neither Steulke (referred to in note 2 above) nor David James gives any importance to the grave ethical and political implications of the reenactment carried out by the boy and the girl in Luiselli’s novel. For details of James’s take on the novel, readers may consult his recent article “Listening to the Refugee: Valeria Luiselli’s Sentimental Activism” (James 2021).

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IV The historian and thinker Faisal Devji argues, by way of reference to M.K.  Gandhi, that children are the only group of citizens who are not allowed by nation-states to imagine their own futures. The excuse presented by governments for such a situation, prevalent all over the globe, is that children are not responsible towards themselves. This “explanation”, however, reveals a paradox at the heart of thinking about the relationship between children and politics. Governments deny children the right to imagine the future but themselves do so in the name of these very children. Unsurprisingly, it is quite common for nation-states to claim that they are building the future for the children and the young and for generations that are yet to come (Devji 2020). In contrast to the way in which governments and nation-states deny children’s political agency, it can be argued that because children depend on others, they live in the present without thinking of making the future. As a result, they grasp the present with more acuity than adults who remain caught up in envisioning the future in one way or another. All imagination of the future entails some form of violence that ultimately undermines the imagination itself and robs it of any and every moral authority. Hence, children make room for the incalculable in the present as their conduct highlights the insufficiency of human knowledge in and about the contemporary (Devji 2014). I would like to suggest that the children in Lost Children Archive are also able to establish an affinity with the histories of the last Apache warriors as well as the lost refugee children primarily because they are not worried about the consequences of their actions. The affinity of their reenactment, in other words, is a result of their acceptance that the future will get made in the process of their actions, which are themselves concomitant with the truth that they do not know enough either about Apache histories or about refugee children. The novel itself appears to testify to this identificatory affinity as it makes it “possible” for the boy and the girl to meet the lost children in an “unreal desert”, a mythical space that resonates with the rhythm of the boy’s unpunctuated narration: “among the echoes of other children, past and future, who kneeled, and laid down, coiled into a fetal position, fell, got lost, did not know if they were alive or dead inside that vast hungry desert” (Luiselli 2019, 328). The boy and the girl go on to share a meal of eagle eggs with the children till the boy sleeps fitfully to understand that “the Eagle Warriors [child Apache warriors his

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father had told him about] had been there with us [them] all this time” and that his sister and he “were safe thanks to them” (Luiselli, 2019, 335). We can consider Luiselli’s act of writing Lost Children Archive in parallel terms. Much like Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli critiques border imperialism through the form of the novel. Yet, her critique gets modulated through the various subtle ways in which she subverts commonplace notions of genre and form like the story, the essay, the non-fictional, the documentary, the elegy, and the road novel. These subversions, however, not only indicate complex ways to undertake the critique of border imperialism in literary writing. Rather, like the circumstance with the boy and the girl in Luiselli’s novel, they also represent the author herself struggling with several genres, forms, and modes of representation to articulate her views about an issue that she does not and cannot know everything about, namely, the lives and circumstances of refugee children. Lost Children Archive, in other words, throws a dual challenge towards its readers—the challenge of responding to the urgencies of the present without imagining the future and without assuming that they know everything about that which makes the contemporary so demanding in the first place. The above argument about Luiselli’s novel being a challenge to its readers can be restated in terms that reveal the author’s nuanced undoing of the form of the novel itself. When Lost Children Archive is examined in the light of the commonplace notion that the thinking of form necessarily follows the comprehension of plot and is therefore stable in nature, the novel’s readers find that the novel does not have a form as such. Its characters, like its author, struggle to respond to various dimensions of problems associated with Apache pasts and refugee children without being able to settle on any method, principle, or value. So, the novel reflects the impossibility of in-forming a novelistic narrative, of writing a novel. It is, in other words, a novel about writing a novel in a processual loop that, by definition, cannot and must not come to an end. Its form thus echoes the consideration of form as detailed in the opening section of this chapter— that form manifests in the moment of its becoming, a becoming that cannot be predicted, foreseen, or (pre)meditated.

References Brigham, Ann. 2015. American Road Narratives: Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film. University of Virginia Press. Culler, Jonathan. 1997. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

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de Obaldia, Claire. 1995. The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism, and the Essay. Clarendon Press. Devji, Faisal. 2014. Politics Without Paternity. Seminar 662 (October). https:// www.india-­seminar.com/2014/662/662_faisal_devji.htm. ———. 2020. Without a Future: Gandhi, Childhood and Politics. E-International Relations, October 1. https://www.e-­ir.info/2020/10/01/without-­a-­future­gandhi-­childhood-­and-­politics/. Focillon, Henri. 1992. The Life of Forms in Art. Zone Books. Frow, John. 2006. Genre. Routledge. James, David. 2021. Listening to the Refugee: Valeria Luiselli’s Sentimental Activism. Modern Fiction Studies 67 (2): 390–417. Leon, Concepcion de. 2019. Valeria Luiselli, at Home in Two Worlds. The New York Times, February 7. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/arts/ valeria-­luiselli-­lost-­children-­archive.html. Luiselli, Valeria. 2017. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. Coffee House Press. ———. 2019. Lost Children Archive. 4th Estate. Nichols, Bill. 2001. Introduction to Documentary. Indiana University Press. Primeau, Ronald. 2013. On American Road Literature. In Critical Insights: American Road Literature, ed. Ronald Primeau, 1–12. EBSCO Publishing. Ramazani, Jahan. 1994. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. University of Chicago Press. Slaughter, Joseph R. 2009. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. Fordham University Press. Steulke, Patricia. 2021. Writing Refugee Crisis in the Age of Amazon. Genre 54 (1): 43–66. Walia, Harsha. 2013. Undoing Border Imperialism. AK Press/Institute for Anarchist Studies. ———. 2021. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Haymarket Books. Wood, James. 2018. How Fiction Works. Picador.

PART IV

Coda

CHAPTER 12

The Refugee Imaginary Pramod Nayar

In refugee texts as diverse as the novel The Glass Palace, in which Amitav Ghosh speaks of the long walk by the refugees from Burma to India, Eoin Colfer’s graphic novel, Illegal, or Nina Sabnani’s graphic short story about the Partition of India, “Know Directions Home?,” we see bodies seeking direction and refuge. The refugee on the long walk, on the tossing-­turning boat, or abandoned on the border between India and Pakistan, perceives the body as not only suffering but also unwanted. In some cases, the “unwanted” morphs into a source and locus of threat—as in Kate Evans’ Threads from the Refugee Crisis. Many novelists and artists, some of them refugees themselves or those who work with them, begin defining what Butler terms the “norms of intelligibility” (2017, 7) with the body, the first and last home that a life form occupies, even when they have lost, like refugees, their homes/homelands. The injured, emaciated and unspeaking body of the Refugee Imaginary is a “dys-appeared” body. Drew Leder, in his phenomenological study of ill bodies, argues that in the period of sickness, one experiences the body as a “dys-appeared” one. This is a body that one perceives as sick or bad or not quite alright (1990). For Leder, the lived body is how one comes to be in the world, attends to the world,

P. Nayar (*) Department of English, The University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Classon Frangos, S. Ghose (eds.), Refugee Genres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2_12

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but also the mode through which the world comes to be (25). The refugee is made to see him/herself as an undesirable body as the norms of intelligibility in the receiving society cause the self to be experienced as a dys-­ appeared one (if one moves from the body to the self). That is, the “dys-appeared” body of the refugee—the Syrian boy who never speaks in Olivier Kugler’s Escaping Wars and Waves would be an instance—is constructed by the receiving society and on occasion the refugee camp as an unwanted body, causing the refugee to see it that way too. How is the refugee constructed outside the realm of the law and the judicial apparatus? Phrased differently, what is the grammar of refugee representation in cultural texts? Between and beyond the categories of “illegal immigrant,” “refugee,” “victim” and such, does the representation in the mass media, Amnesty and UN reportage, the literary text, the oral testimony, or the fragmented memoir offer up the refugee in multiple ways with a distinctive grammar of their own? Or does, in the words of this volume’s introduction, “refugee art and performance reflect and intervene in the discourses and procedures responsible for defining and delimiting refugeedom itself”? The “discourses and procedures” of speaking of the refugee may be termed the “Refugee Imaginary.” The term captures both the set of constructions, representations and discourses produced by the migrant and the refugee and the constructions of the migrant and the refugee by the receiving society, transnational organizations and governments. The Imaginary determines the nature of the reception of the refugee, their perceptions of themselves and the nature and degree of their engagement with the receiving society. The Refugee Imaginary is at work in multiple media formats and genres, some of which this volume has set out to explore in depth. In what follows, I move back and forth between the production of the forms of the Refugee Imaginary and modalities of reading them, the interpretive communities that (ought to) congeal around the Imaginary, and the rise of a new globalism, by which I mean a thinking about the global that focuses on global humanitarianism. The Refugee Imaginary influences how the archive around the Refugee is built. For instance, as Roland Bleiker et al. have demonstrated, a dehumanization of the refugee figure is visible in the photographic representations carried in Australian news coverage (2013). This form of representation has two possible readings. First, to dehumanize the refugee is to (re)present her/him as less-than-human and therefore undeserving of human rights, welfare and social benefits. That is, the dehumanization

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process categorizes the incoming refugee as bare life, and not entitled to anything that sustains this life. Dehumanization in refugee narratives, whether visual or verbal testimonies, is also paradoxical in that this same “undeserving” life form—the refugee—is also simultaneously a threat to the receiving society. Placing the refugees in a group or photographing them as a collective at once erases the individual and poses the group as a (threatening) mass. Following from this, it no longer becomes possible, as Tom Allbeson has argued, to have a “personalized concern” towards the refugee (2015, 410). Second, even when the refugee is dehumanized and depersonalized, such images of grouped refugees could possibly represent cultural trauma, as examined by Jeffrey Alexander (2004). It is under such circumstances, and in the face of such representations of cultural trauma, Alexander writes, that groups and societies begin to “cognitively identify” sources of human suffering (1). The Refugee Imaginary, by focusing, as the above example shows, on the massed peoples who have stepped off the boat seeking asylum, can, however, also achieve something else. The emphasis on the moment of their arrival, their bedraggled state, their haunted expressions may dehumanize them, but it can also alert us to the contexts in which such a haunted expression, the emaciated appearance and the general sense of ill-being emerged. That is, the reader of the Refugee Imaginary could move beyond the photograph of a refugee group and query the context in which such expressions and corporeal appearance were born. In this, I adapt the work of Susie Linfield, who suggests that we must look beyond the images in order to recognize the contexts and realities of the images (2010, 51; cf. Szörényi 2006, 25). The Refugee Imaginary and its forms are not solely about the images and texts in and of themselves, but the contexts in which these forms and texts emerged, as I have argued elsewhere about atrocity archives of the inmates in the Khmer Rouge prisons, where the frontal view photograph is unadorned with any descriptor or biography, except a number. Here, the photograph shows nothing more than the face, so that the collection—the Genocide Studies Program of Yale University—does not provide the history of any individual, but rather offers the history of the context in which she/he was photographed (Genocide Studies Program 2021). Thus, the context in which the photographs were taken, the history of the photographed, become central to our reading. Significantly, it is in the very nature of the Refugee Imaginary’s genres and forms that “we

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cannot be sure which is more horrific: what the photographs reveal or what they hide” (Nayar 2021a). For the readers and consumers of the refugee archive, the context in which the images were produced—photographs taken, interviews conducted, stories told, accounts narrated—of, by and around the migrant and the refugee, the Imaginary is primarily one that calls for a public “apprehension” and, consequently, a public mourning. The archive embodies an Imaginary, but is also open to be re-read so that the focus on rights, empowerment and institutional processes (of incarceration, or acquittal) may be examined. The archive is at once the locus of an Imaginary that demonstrates how rights were violated, and the wellspring of a resistant reading. In short, the archive, with its multimodal form, is the epitome of a “human rights culture” and enables a reading that attends to what is shared by narratives of suffering while at the same time recognizing the particular situations and positions of those who suffer; it explores how narratives probe the limits of language, representation, and translation to depict their subjects adequately; it reflects awareness of the arguably “west-centric” history of human rights, taking account of representations of non-western approaches to human rights, and of economic and social rights as well as third-generation solidarity rights; and it engages in both reflection upon and critique of the theories of the liberal subject and the liberal democratic state that underlie the modern international human rights system. (Goldberg and Moore 2012, 3–4)

The narratives and Imaginary, beside generating a public—about which more later—is instrumental in developing frames of defining, of apprehending, life. Judith Butler defines “apprehension” as “norms of intelligibility about life” (2009, 7). In the face of the suffering of others, our response hinges on a “certain field of perceptible reality … one in which the notion of the recognizable human is formed and maintained over and against what cannot be named or regarded as the human” (64). To apprehend the refugee in the text as a human who has been denied her/his humanity by circumstances, to apprehend the absence of an environment in which the refugee can reclaim this lost humanity and to apprehend that what we see in the photographs or the testimonies is a human who suffers/has suffered—this is the agenda set for us by the refugee genres. The “norms of intelligibility” are in fact the grammar of the Refugee Imaginary and its genres.

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Authors and illustrators working with refugee themes struggle over the grammar, and the essays in this volume capture some of this struggle. In works like Tings Chak’s Undocumented, there are spaces of migrant incarceration, minus the migrant. Chak draws Canadian cities of refuge, carceral spaces such as rooms and lobbies, buildings and grounds, all minus the human (except as outline sketches of the human form). The extreme depersonalization of the refugee in spaces designed to reduce the refugee to semblances—outlines—of their ontological identity is powerfully rendered in this speechless, humanless text. In the process, argues Claudia Rifkind, Chak “demands the right to look at the secretive spaces of migrant detention whose dehumanizing practices are unrepresented in dominant discourse” (Rifkind 2017, 652–653). Chak suggests that the depersonalized refugee is the consequence of norms of intelligibility that refuse to present the body of the refugee. In terms of the form, Chak’s emphasis on spaces where such depersonalization is built into the very architecture means that the text draws attention to the absence of even textual evidence when speaking of the refugee/migrant. If norms of intelligibility construct the body as unwanted and “dys-­ appeared,” then the society which reads these texts, the interpretive community of these texts, might require to develop a certain ethical-humanitarian stance towards the images and texts. The context of the Refugee Imaginary’s consumption, to forward an argument, is one of public mourning in such an interpretive community created through the Imaginary. Maurizio Albahari, writing in the wake of Europe’s refugee crisis, asks: Can there be public mourning, once migrant deaths and needless suffering are understood as not accidental? Can there be mourning when … responsibilities [of these deaths] … are located not at sea, or with smugglers’ unscrupulousness, but at the heart of liberal democracy? (2016, 279)

One notes that Albahari is addressing not “accidental” deaths of the kind associated with Aylan Kurdi, but the contexts in which such deaths were made possible and produced and as a result, require a different order of response. If liberal democracies have “produced” such deaths, then, says Albahari, we also need to evaluate what we understand as “accidental” deaths as well as the norms of public mourning. The Refugee Imaginary is thus folded into both acts of representation and the consumption/appropriate response to these acts, at the centre of which is a “dys-appeared” body.

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The presence of norms of ethical intelligibility—if one were to expand Butler’s phrase—when documented implicitly if not explicitly in the Refugee Imaginary and its multimodal representational forms, enable us to define the text as a “humanitarian narrative.” Thomas Laqueur writes: The humanitarian narrative relies on the personal body, not only as the locus of pain but also as the common bond between those who suffer and those who would help and as the object of the scientific discourse through which the causal links between an evil, a victim, and a benefactor are forged. (1989, 177)

Now, the humanitarian narrative may or may not constitute a distinct genre but, as the editors to the current volume signal in the introduction, “the concept of ‘genre’ is thus not meant to provide an exhaustive account of cultural forms, but to understand how refugee aesthetics become legible within and against a global cultural field shaped by the genre-system.” This “global cultural field” generated by the humanitarian narrative which is the Refugee Imaginary’s many texts, is an instrument of coalition, solidarity and a new geography of the world. The causal links that Laqueur speaks of are crucial to, and point at, the forging of a new globalism at work, and one that is beyond the United Nations’ efforts. The Imaginary and these narratives are integral to the making of, first, a moral coalition and second, a coalition of the willing. Sarah Maxey argues that “uncovering the power of humanitarian narratives requires moving beyond aggregate analysis—focused on whether anyone responds to humanitarian claims—to ask who responds to these appeals and under what conditions” (2020, 680). Those who respond are the ones who make up the two forms of coalition, and there are historical antecedents to this form of coalitional globalism. Historically, as the work of Alan Lester has demonstrated, it is the humanitarian narrative and its attendant regimes that produced campaigns against slavery and other such conditions (Lester 2000). As Lester puts it, there arose a “moral geography of the globe,” where Europeans felt a certain responsibility for “distant strangers” (Lester and Dussart 2014, 278; cf. Ballantyne 2011; Lester and Dussart 2014). The Refugee Imaginary and its forms constitute the emergence of a new globalism and global narrative. This humanitarian narrative and its forms of categorization—such as the “deserving” immigrant or the “filthy child” of social work discourse (see Taylor 2008)—is not without its politics or problems,

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but one still insists that they play an important role in generating a global interpretive community and moral geography. Volumes such as the present one, with representative texts from all over the world, create the global interpretive community that generates and is generated by affective “cross-traumatic affiliation” (Craps 2013). Witnessing Syrian, Somalian, Congolese, Afghani—I write in the immediate aftermath of the Taliban takeover of Kabul and the numerous images of Afghanis seeking to flee their country, and many dying in the process— means bearing witness to structural inequalities and trauma-across-­ borders. This is precisely what the Refugee Imaginary produces. To bear witness through the “global cultural field shaped by the genre-system” is to not only be a part of the interpretive community but transform interpretive communities into “issue networks.” Issue networks at the global level are constitutive of a public sphere in which an issue “sparks a public into being” (Renshaw 2013, 39). The necropolitical and ecocritical aspects of the contemporary novel, film or philosophy (the latter being the subject of Graça P. Corrêa’s essay in this volume) produce such a public, as Layla Renshaw proposes. The “public” that emerges in the face and consumption of such an archive is integral to the making of a “Human Rights Culture,” about which Michael Galchinsky says, [it] is generally not as concerned about the juncture between facts and norms (Habermas 1998) as it is about the juncture between feelings and forms. It is less about establishing an agreed code, and more about sharing individual experiences. Emotionally resonant human rights art typically doesn’t change laws or regimes; rather, it seeks to change the prevailing ethos, by depicting what human rights mean for the individuals who are deprived of them, who witness the abuse, who perpetrate it, who mourn the victims, who intervene, who provide aid, or who transmit the stories. By relating such experiences, human rights culture tries to shape a durable recollection for the wounded community. (2016, viii)

I conclude with a perhaps strange proposition, or provocation. The sense of shared ecoprecarity across cultures in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic is also instrumental in making, in a very broad sense, refugees of humanity as a whole. Hidden behind walls, afraid of the world outside and the very air we breathe, the pandemic transformed our collective sense of the world as a place of threat, a means of imbibing a pathogen

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and a sociality that forced us into distancing rather than aggregation. While it may be a stretch to argue a case for the “refugeedom” of the human race in the Covid year 2020–21, with the sight of empty cities— the New York Times’ “The Great Empty” captured this so brilliantly—it cannot be denied that humanity sought refuge from the virus. As the world humans built showed signs of lapsing/growing into the post-­ natural—with animals roaming the streets and plants emerging from pavements and street corners—ecoprecarity defined the human condition. The Refugee Imaginary is one which works across and through multiple forms. The Refugee demands not one but many forms. The generic conventions of the humanitarian narrative, which could well be the core of the Refugee Imaginary, go some way towards the making of the globalism of the politics of rescue, pity, solidarity and activism. Acknowledgements  Some of the arguments here first appeared in Pramod Nayar (2021b), The Human Rights Graphic Novel: Drawing it Just Right.

References Albahari, Maurizio. 2016. After the Shipwreck: Mourning and Citizenship in the Mediterranean, Our Sea. Social Research 83 (2): 275–294. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma. In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey C.  Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, 1–30. University of California Press. Allbeson, Tom. 2015. Photographic Diplomacy in the Postwar World: UNESCO and the Conception of Photography as a Universal Language, 1946–1956. Modern Intellectual History 12 (2): 383–415. Ballantyne, Tony. 2011. Humanitarian Narratives: Knowledge and the Politics of Mission and Empire. Social Sciences and Missions 24 (2–3): 233–264. Bleiker, Roland, David Campbell, Emma Hutchison, and Xzarina Nicholson. 2013. The Visual Dehumanisation of Refugees. Australian Journal of Political Science 48 (4): 398–416. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso. Chak, Tings. 2014. Undocumented. Westmount, QC: The Architecture Observer. Colfer, Eoin, and Andrew Donkin. 2017. Illegal. Hodder. Craps, Steff. 2013. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Palgrave Macmillan. Evans, Kate. 2017. Threads from the Refugee Crisis. Verso. Galchinsky, Michael. 2016. The Modes of Human Rights Literature: Towards a Culture Without Borders. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Genocide Studies Program. 2021. Yale University. Accessed 19 October 2021. https://gsp.yale.edu/cgp/gallery/cts. Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson, and Alexandra Schultheis Moore. 2012. Human Rights and Literature: The Development of an Interdiscipline. In Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, ed. Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, 3–16. Routledge. Kugler, Olivier. 2017. Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees. University of Pennsylvania Press. Laqueur, Thomas W. 1989. Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative. In The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt, 176–204. University of California Press. Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. University of Chicago Press. Lester, Alan. 2000. Obtaining the ‘Due Observance of Justice’: The Geographies of Colonial Humanitarianism. Environment and Planning D 20: 277–293. Lester, Alan, and Fae Dussart. 2014. Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines Across the Nineteenth Century British Empire. Cambridge University Press. Linfield, Susie. 2010. The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. University of Chicago Press. Maxey, Sarah. 2020. The Power of Humanitarian Narratives: A Domestic Coalition Theory of Justifications for Military Action. Political Research Quarterly 73 (3): 680–695. Nayar, Pramod K. 2021a. Why Atrocity Archives Exist, and Why We Need Them. The Wire, June 13. https://thewire.in/history/why-­atrocity-­archives-­exist-­ and-­why-­we-­need-­them. ———. 2021b. The Human Rights Graphic Novel: Drawing It Just Right. Routledge. New York Times. “The Great Empty.” Introduction by Michael Kimmelman. New York Times, March 23. Accessed 15 October 2021. https://www.nytimes. com/interactive/2020/03/23/world/coronavirus-­great-­empty.html. Renshaw, Layla. 2013. The Dead and Their Public: Memory Campaigns, Issue Networks and the Role of the Archaeologist in the Excavation of Mass Graves. Archaeological Dialogues 20 (1): 35–47. Rifkind, Candida. 2017. Refugee Comics and Migrant Topographies. A/b: Auto/ Biography Studies 32 (3): 648–654. Sabnani, Nina. 2013. Know Directions Home? In This Side That Side: Restorying Partition: Graphic Narratives from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, ed. Vishwajyoti Ghosh, 99–111. Yoda Press. Szörényi, Anna. 2006. The Images Speak for Themselves? Reading Refugee Coffee-Table Books. Visual Studies 21 (1): 24–41. Taylor, Caroline. 2008. Humanitarian Narrative: Bodies and Detail in Late-­ Victorian Social Work. British Journal of Social Work 38 (4): 680–696.

Correction to: Why Refugee Genres? Refugee Representation and Cultural Form Mike Classon Frangos and Sheila Ghose

Correction to: Chapter 1 in: M. Classon Frangos, S. Ghose (eds.), Refugee Genres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2_1 Chapter, [“Why Refugee Genres? Refugee Representation and Cultural Form”] was previously published non-open access. It has now been changed to open access under a CC BY 4.0 license and the copyright holder updated to ‘The Author(s)’. The book has also been updated with this change.

The updated original version for this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­031-­09257-­2_1 © The Author(s) 2023 M. Classon Frangos, S. Ghose (eds.), Refugee Genres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2_13

C1

Index1

A Abderrezak, Hakim, 181 Activism/activist, 3, 6, 14, 111–129, 185n2, 191, 242 Aesthetic, 5, 6, 7n3, 8, 9, 13, 16–18, 32, 34, 52, 90, 91, 99, 101, 112, 113, 128, 134, 137, 149, 158, 177, 179, 182, 217, 218, 223, 224, 240 Affect/affective, 12, 14, 18, 30–32, 32n1, 41, 45, 94, 97, 126, 134, 135, 137, 149, 160, 161, 167, 218, 220, 223, 225, 227, 241 Agency, 4, 5, 19, 79, 85, 90, 101, 112, 116, 117, 127, 150, 191, 230 Ahmed, Sara, 91, 92, 96–100, 102, 116–119, 122 Amiry, Suad, 17, 67–69, 79–85 Apache, 223, 224, 226, 227, 229–231 Arabic, 18, 67, 78, 81, 83, 92, 93, 93n3, 158, 178, 181, 185, 186

Archive, 8, 9, 49, 179, 189, 225, 226, 228n2, 236–238, 241 Arendt, Hannah, 27, 29, 30, 42, 116 Asylum, 3, 11–15, 14n7, 26, 27, 30, 35, 36, 39, 40, 53, 61, 112, 113, 115n6, 120, 121, 126, 128, 142, 185, 219, 224, 237 Asylum seeker, 4, 11–15, 15n8, 17, 26–28, 35–37, 39–41, 61, 68, 115n6, 116, 117 Audience, 29, 35, 39, 94, 100, 113–115, 122, 125, 128, 218, 220, 225 Austerlitz (W.G. Sebald), 201 Austin, J.L., 172 Autobiography, 13, 13n6, 14, 35, 37, 47n4, 49, 50n6, 56n11, 58–62, 186 Ávila Laurel, Juan Tomás, 18, 177–184, 188–192 Azoulay, Ariella, 181, 182

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Classon Frangos, S. Ghose (eds.), Refugee Genres, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2

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246 

INDEX

B Beah, Ishmael, 14 Belonging, 7, 17, 19, 26, 27, 32, 70, 72, 94, 98, 100, 112, 117, 119, 134, 160, 165, 180, 181, 186, 197, 206, 210 Berlant, Lauren, 2, 13, 16, 32–34, 36 The Best We Could Do (Thi Bui), 12, 16, 46, 47, 52, 58–63, 59n12 Bhabha, Homi, 159, 165 Bildung, 10, 11, 18, 27, 30, 34, 35, 40, 41, 157–174 Bildungsroman, 3, 7, 10, 11, 16, 18, 29, 157–174, 217 Biography, 13, 237 Blasim, Hassan, 18, 177–180, 184–189, 191, 192 Boat people, 53, 57, 61 Borders, 14, 15, 18, 50, 54, 69, 75, 80, 115, 116, 119–127, 138, 142, 177, 178, 181–184, 186–188, 191, 192, 215, 218, 220–222, 227, 229, 235 EU, 116, 138, 191 imperialism, 215, 216, 216n1, 218, 219, 223, 231 Mexico-US, 19, 119, 219, 221, 222 Bosnia, 158, 168–170, 191 Brexit, 115, 116, 125–127, 126n11 Bui, Thi, 3, 12, 16, 45–47, 46n2, 52, 58–63 Bureaucratic, 3, 5, 14, 15, 61 Butler, Judith, 235, 238, 240 C Camps reeducation, 55, 56 refugee, 5, 12, 16, 26, 28, 39, 59, 61, 95, 136, 150, 186, 188, 236 Canada, 196, 202, 203

Capitalism/capitalist, 18, 54, 118, 136, 147, 151, 179, 191, 215, 216 Capitalocene, 135, 143, 149 Caricature, 50, 50n6 Central America, 219 Chak, Tings, 239 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 2 Children, 14, 19, 49, 50, 60, 62, 93, 112, 138, 139, 142, 145, 149, 196, 199–203, 209, 215–231 Citizen, 4, 6, 10, 12, 26, 28, 32, 34, 36, 39–41, 54, 115, 117, 119, 122–124, 185, 229, 230 Citizenship, 26, 27, 29, 32, 33, 36, 41, 54, 69, 70, 117, 195, 216, 219 Colonialism/colonial, 52, 53, 55, 59, 69, 70, 73, 78, 79, 81, 112, 117, 180–182, 180n1, 190–192 Comics, 1, 2, 8, 9, 12, 16, 45–56, 46n1, 47n4, 58, 59, 59n12, 63 Coming-of-age, 157–159, 161, 165, 170, 174, 217 Community/communities, 12, 28, 36, 37, 60, 68, 70, 80–82, 84, 85, 96, 100, 112, 114, 116, 117, 127, 133–135, 144, 150, 206, 209, 236, 239, 241 Compassion, 12–14, 16, 32, 32n1, 33, 41, 149 Covid, 1, 2, 2n1, 115, 241, 242 Crisis, 2, 115, 116, 137, 138, 196, 208, 222, 225, 239 Critical Refugee Studies, 3, 5, 53, 53n10, 54

 INDEX 

Culture/cultural, 1–19, 31, 46, 47, 47n3, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 67, 68, 72, 79, 81, 84, 92, 96, 98, 102, 112–119, 118n7, 125–129, 146, 148–150, 179, 190, 196, 200, 205, 206, 210, 220, 236–238, 240, 241 Cyprus, 17, 67–85, 84n1 D Documentary, 3, 6, 9, 15–18, 15n8, 32, 37, 48–51, 133–151, 181, 216, 224, 231 E Ecocentric, 17, 18, 133–151 Ecocritical, 18, 134, 136, 137, 140, 150, 241 Ecoprecarity, 241, 242 Elegy/elegies/elegiac, 216, 225, 226, 228, 231 Empathy, 3, 4, 12, 13, 16–18, 25–42, 133–151, 202, 221, 227 England, 196, 198, 205, 206, 210n3 Equatorial Guinea, 179, 180n1, 190 Espiritu, Yến Lê, 5n2, 47, 53 Essay, 2, 3, 19, 79, 80, 116, 179, 187, 196, 216, 220, 222, 224, 229n3, 231, 239, 241 European Union, 120, 138, 182 F Far to Go (Alison Pick), 18, 19, 195–211 Fiction, 2, 11, 15, 29, 77, 137, 159, 160, 163, 164, 167, 169, 170, 186, 199, 200, 210, 216, 217 Film, 3, 6, 7, 15–17, 34, 47, 51, 56, 133–151, 184, 223, 241

247

Finland, 184, 185, 187 Form of the novel, 12, 18, 196, 216, 217, 231 as transformative, 216, 218 Fragment/fragmentation, 6, 18, 83, 98, 157–160, 162, 164, 166, 169, 177–180, 182, 187 Fuocoammare/Fire at Sea, 15 G Gender, 59 Genre, 1–19, 29, 35, 41, 48, 68, 69, 76–80, 85, 113, 137, 215–231, 236–238, 240 Germany, 89, 93–95, 101, 196, 198, 206 Global North, 18, 68, 70, 178, 179 Global South, 6, 14, 114, 178, 180, 180n1, 189, 191 Graphic memoir, 3, 6, 12, 16, 17, 45–58 Gurnah, Abdulrazak, 2 The Gurugu Pledge (Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel), 18, 177–182, 184, 187, 189, 190 H Hirsch, Marianne, 46, 48n5, 49, 196, 197n1, 199–201 Hispanophone, global, 180, 180n1, 189, 190 History, 3, 5, 6, 8–14, 16–18, 26, 35, 41, 45–61, 46n2, 63, 67, 69, 70, 73, 75, 76, 78, 80, 84, 84n1, 85, 91, 94, 118, 120, 125, 127, 147, 148, 179, 180, 180n1, 182, 184, 190–192, 197–199, 197n1, 202, 206, 210, 215, 223, 224, 227, 229, 230, 237, 238

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INDEX

Humanitarian organizations, 2, 5, 26, 28, 34, 42, 46n2 subject, 4–6, 12, 13, 27, 32, 34, 35 Human rights, 4, 8–14, 35, 48, 121, 134, 217, 236, 238, 241

85, 158, 159, 178, 179, 185, 191, 197, 197n1, 216n1, 217, 220, 223, 231, 236 Lost Children Archive (Valeria Luiselli), 19, 215–231 Luiselli, Valeria, 19, 215–231

I Identity, 4, 17, 50, 56n11, 61, 67, 68, 70–72, 77, 79, 81, 85, 90, 91, 99, 100, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 160, 164–166, 172, 173, 177, 178, 182, 183, 185, 200, 202, 203, 205, 206, 222, 239 Imperialism/imperialist, 47, 52, 73, 76, 82, 144, 215, 216, 216n1, 218, 219, 223, 231 Interview, 3, 14n7, 17, 36, 55, 60, 89–91, 94n4, 99–101, 122, 137, 141, 149, 185, 186, 224, 238 Iraq, 138, 179, 184 Iraqi Christ (Hassan Blasim), 177, 185, 187 Island, 15, 67–69, 71–81, 83–85, 84n1, 123, 138, 144, 146

M Malkki, Liisa, 5, 5n2, 46n2 Maus (Art Spiegelman), 46, 48–50, 48n5, 54, 59, 60, 201 Mbembe, Achille, 135, 140, 146 Media, 7, 14–17, 32, 49, 74, 114, 116, 122, 125, 178, 179, 189, 236 Media art, 178 Mediterranean, 17, 67–85, 120, 138, 181, 183 Melilla, 18, 120, 177–192 Memoir, 6, 8, 9, 13–15, 13n5, 47n4, 52, 58–60, 62, 79, 160, 162, 163, 236 Memory, 2, 3, 8, 16, 19, 25–42, 45–49, 48n5, 51–55, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 81, 90, 93, 95, 97, 98, 101, 157, 158, 160, 163, 165, 170, 171, 177, 180, 182, 183, 195–199, 202, 204–211, 210n3, 224 Migrant, 5, 29, 50, 68, 100, 112, 136, 177, 215, 236 Migration, forced, 18, 89, 91, 92, 96, 99, 100, 136n1, 141, 157–174, 179, 191 Migrations: Harbour Europé, 17, 111–129 Moore, Jason, 135 Moria, 138 Morocco, 120, 138, 181, 182 Motherhood, 62 Mr Rosenblum’s List (Natasha Solomons), 18, 19, 195–211

K Kindertransporte, 19, 196, 201, 203 Kreisler, Georg, 100 L Lesbos, 15, 138 Life writing, 1–3, 6, 7, 12–14, 13n6, 16, 17, 29, 46, 46n2, 47n4, 59, 59n12, 69, 79, 80, 85 Literary form, 13, 14, 18, 79, 158, 159, 189, 192, 199 Literary, the, 1–3, 7–12, 13n5, 16, 18, 52, 54, 67, 69, 70, 75, 77–80,

 INDEX 

N Narrative address, 163, 200 Narrative, dominant, 58 Narratology, 160 National Socialist, 195, 196, 203 Nation-state, 4, 5, 124, 159, 215, 216, 218, 222, 230 Nayeri, Dina, 14, 16, 25–42 Necropolitics, necropolitical, 17, 18, 133–151, 241 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 2, 3, 5, 54, 63 Non-fiction, 7, 216, 221 Novel, road, 216, 228, 229, 231 Nyers, Peter, 4, 5, 27 O Onomatopoeia, 167, 168 P Palestine, 68, 80, 81 Performance, 3, 4, 6, 8, 14–17, 52, 89, 102n5, 112–117, 120, 123–129, 157–174, 236 Performative, performativity, 8, 9, 14, 15, 90, 127 Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi), 48, 48n5, 50 Photography, 7, 51, 148 Pick, Alison, 18, 19, 195–211 Poetry, poetic, 1–3, 6–9, 17, 52, 68, 69, 80, 85, 119, 120, 137, 149, 178, 181 Postcolonial, 7, 10, 13n5, 13n6, 17, 69, 70, 73, 75–78, 80–82, 84, 85, 177–180, 183, 190–192, 197 Postgeneration, 63, 196, 199, 200, 204, 210, 211 Postmemory, 18, 19, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52, 54–58, 60, 62, 195–211 Prcić, Ismet, 18 Precarization, 135, 147

249

Q Qatsi, 147, 149 R Racism, 33, 34, 115, 118, 215 Refugee Convention 1951, 141, 144 Refugee crisis, 113, 196, 225, 239 Refugeedom, 3–6, 5n2, 8, 12–18, 26, 27, 34, 41, 46, 48, 50, 53, 62, 63, 112, 113, 116, 140, 236, 242 Refugees climate, 141–143 definitions of, 15, 36, 136, 141 developmental, 144–147 Refugee Tales, 2 Reggio, Godfrey, 18, 137, 147–149 Representation migrant, 113, 115, 123, 126, 127, 177, 189 refugee, 1–19, 28–29, 46, 48n5, 50, 53, 236 self-, 6, 46, 47, 50n6, 58, 113, 125, 127, 128 Rosi, Gianfranco, 15 S Satrapi, Marjane, 48, 50 Sebald, W.G., 201 Second World War (World War II), 5, 5n2, 51, 94, 195, 228 Shakespeare, 157, 158 Shards (Ismet Prcic)́ , 18, 157–174 Shoah, 197, 197n1, 199, 200 Short story, 17, 18, 67–71, 73, 75–80, 85, 177, 179, 181, 185, 187, 188, 235 Silence, silencing, 5, 52, 56, 127, 168, 171 Singapore, 144–146 Slaughter, Joseph, 10, 11, 29, 158, 162n5, 217

250 

INDEX

Solomons, Natasha, 18, 19, 195–211 Song, 3, 6, 8, 9, 16, 17, 89–108, 102n5 Sonoran Desert, 218, 220, 227, 229 Sovereignty, 4, 124, 142 Spiegelman, Art, 46, 48–50, 54, 59, 201 Stonebridge, Lyndsey, 5n2, 9, 29, 30, 42, 195–198, 210 Storytelling, 8, 15, 15n8, 28, 29, 36, 38, 40, 63, 90, 91, 101, 137, 172, 182, 183, 185, 187, 224 Syria, 72, 76, 94, 95, 99, 138, 140 T Tell Me How It Ends (Valeria Luiselli), 19, 215–231 Testimony, testimonial, 2, 12, 13, 16, 30, 40, 46, 49, 60, 79, 80, 160, 162, 197, 199, 236 Theatre/theater, 3, 6, 9, 14, 16, 17, 111–129, 158, 219 Tran, G.B., 12, 45–47, 46n2, 52, 54–60, 63 Translation, 18, 30, 31, 41, 68, 92n2, 93n3, 111n1, 127, 178, 185, 187, 189, 190, 238 Transnational, 6, 8, 17, 18, 30, 31, 46, 47, 52, 54, 55, 81, 113, 129, 178, 179, 191, 236 Trauma, 11–14, 13n5, 19, 48, 48n5, 51, 55, 56, 60, 63, 160, 161, 172, 185, 195–199, 204, 210, 237 U Undocumented (Tings Chak), 25–42, 239 Unesco, 145 The Ungrateful Refugee (Dina Nayeri), 14, 16

UNHCR, 136 United Kingdom (UK), 1, 17, 68, 112, 115–118, 115n6, 118n7, 122, 122n8, 125–129, 126n11, 185, 190 United States (USA), 16, 48, 54, 100, 120, 169, 218, 219, 221, 224, 225, 227, 229 V Vietnam, 47, 52, 54, 55, 57–61 Vietnamerica (G.B. Tran), 12, 16, 45–47, 52, 54–59, 63 Vietnam War, 5, 16, 45, 47, 47n3, 51–55, 51n7, 51n8, 52n9, 58, 59, 61, 63 Violence, 5, 12, 14, 18, 26, 40, 41, 47, 48, 68, 73, 78, 82, 112, 117, 126, 136, 139, 141, 144, 147, 170, 182, 191, 192, 218, 230 W Waiting, 16, 25–42, 70, 75, 95, 168, 202, 222 Weil, Simone, 133, 134, 147 Weiwei, Ai, 185n2 Werder Bremen, 96, 98 “Why Don’t You Write a Novel, Instead of Talking About All These Characters?” (Hassan Blasim), 177, 187 Witness, witnessing, 12, 13, 28, 35, 46, 46n1, 48, 48n5, 49, 60, 62, 76, 122, 146, 165, 184, 224–226, 229, 241 Z Zollhausboys, 17, 89–108