The importance of reading refugee literature

With Wolfgang Iser’s notions of “fictionalizing as an act of overstepping” Iser 939 the reality of lived experiences guiding our understanding of refugee literature, this essay argues t

BORDER STORIES THAT RESOUND: WHY REFUGEE

LITERATURE ARE IMPORTANT WORKS OF FICTION

SIM POH LING CHRISTABEL

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

2012

BORDER STORIES THAT RESOUND: WHY REFUGEE LITERATURE ARE IMPORTANT WORKS OF FICTION

SIM POH LING CHRISTABEL

(BA (Hons), NUS)

A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR

THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS (RESEARCH)

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

2012

Table of Contents

Listening to the Refugee Speak: Difficulties of Representation 22

Chapter 4: UNHCR Fictions and their Claims to Literariness and Authenticity 42

Lesson Module: “The Depiction of Refugee Experience in Literature” 51

Chapter 5: What is the What and its Claims to Literariness and Authenticity 68

Summary

While there is a lot of writing produced as a result of refugee studies, there is, presently,

no go-to source of critical writings on refugee literature This essay, thus, attempts to critically analyze some key examples of refugee literature from a theoretical perspective

In particular, the essay will look at UNHCR literary fictions and Dave Eggers’s novel,

What is the What With Wolfgang Iser’s notions of “fictionalizing as an act of

overstepping” (Iser 939) the reality of lived experiences guiding our understanding of refugee literature, this essay argues that it is the defamiliarization of the refugee from its doxological representations through the use of fictional technique that enables refugee literature to rise above individual refugee experiences to foreground the urgency of the worldwide condition of refugees post-World War II

Furthermore, if literary fictions can reproduce the illusion of the refugee

experience for readers, then refugee literature can be considered successful in its act of fictionalizing The successful texts do more than enlarge the experience for their readers; they are the hope of survival for all other refugees, that these refugees too can one day share their stories

Chapter 1: Introduction

Giorgio Agamben’s essay on the implications of refugees in the nation-state, in response

to Hannah Arendt’s “We Refugees,” is predicated on the inherent contradiction between the “temporary condition [of the refugee] that should lead to either naturalization or to

repatriation” (116) and the “permanently resident mass of noncitizens, who neither can be

nor want to be naturalized or repatriated” (117) To Agamben, this permanent presence of noncitizens must play itself out in two forms of how refugees are considered: either these refugees are destined to die in extermination camps (as did the denationalized Jews and gypsies in the Holocaust) or these refugees are to be considered as the incarnation of a renewed understanding of citizenship where all members of political communities are “in [positions] of exodus or refuge” (118) The first consideration of death is a non-option, because it points towards the self-extermination of the human existence through political discrimination The second option is an idealistic one, because it calls for the surrender of traditional notions of boundaries and political power to a new understanding of

“reciprocal extraterritorialities” (118) in which everyone is nothing more than a refugee However, because extermination camps threaten the very rubric of society and the

unending conflicts of space and cultures result in innumerable people being forcibly displaced, the world cannot overlook the position that refugees occupy in society

While naturalization and repatriation are options, I am, like Agamben, interested

in the overspill – those refugees who cannot be (or have yet to be) naturalized or

repatriated Agamben’s essay harks back to Arendt’s assertion that “[t]hose few refugees who insist upon telling the truth get in exchange for their unpopularity one priceless advantage: history is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the

privilege of Gentiles” (119) While Arendt was talking about Jewish refugees of the Second World War in her article, Agamben extended her assertion to all European

refugees In the present day, Arendt’s assertion can be further expanded to include

refugees of all sorts, especially since the United Nations High Commissioner for

Refugees’s (hereafter known as UNHCR) Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (hereafter shortened to Protocol) formalized the term “refugee” to reach beyond Europe

and the Second World War to “new refugee situations that have arisen since the

Convention was adopted and that the refugees concerned may therefore not fall within the scope of the Convention” (46) Refugees can be found all over the world today, even though there are higher concentrations of refugee situations in the economically poorer countries The sheer number of refugees that the world faces today – they number at 10.5

million when tabulated at the end of 2010 (Global Trends 2010 2) – increases the

urgency with which everyone who is a citizen of any nation-state in the world today has

to consider about the role of the refugee in the community in which he or she exists Who

is the refugee and how is he or she figured in discourses emerging from the Second World War? If a refugee is to be a permanent noncitizen of a host country, how should he

or she be accepted or repelled?

Arendt suggests that the answers lie with the “truth” that refugees tell, in that

“[r]efugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples – if they keep their identity” (Arendt, “We” 119) Agamben argues that “the refugee is the sole category in which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits of a political community to come” (Agamben 114) However, while there is a lot of writing produced

as a result of refugee studies, there is, presently, no go-to source of critical writings on

refugee literature This essay, thus, will begin by examining the figure of the refugee and its representations in public discourses to gain an understanding of how the refugee is understood in historical, socio-political and academic terms Then, the essay will look more closely at representations of refugee experiences in literary fictions in order to start

to understand what “truth” (Arendt, “We” 119) Arendt is pointing to and how such

literary figurations of the refugee are crucial to furthering our overall levels of knowledge and critical reflection on issues such as the presence and treatment of refugees With Wolfgang Iser’s notions of “fictionalizing as an act of overstepping” (Iser 939) the reality

of lived experiences guiding our understanding of refugee literature, this essay argues that it is the defamiliarization of the refugee from its doxological representations through the use of fictional technique that enables refugee literature to rise above individual refugee experiences to foreground the urgency of the worldwide condition of refugees post-World War II

Chapter 2: The Post-World War II Refugee

Early Use of “Refugee”

The earliest use of the word “refugee” as a term to refer to people “who [have]

been forced to leave his or her home and seek refuge elsewhere” (“refugee, n.”) that is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) is an entry dating back

to 1692 The entry reads so:

He [sc James II] wanted nothing but Power to make himself Absolute, and to

make us all Papists, or Martyrs, or Refugees

Thus, by this description, a refugee is someone who flees from the dominant religious order of the day (Roman Catholicism) because of persecution by the ruling power This is

supported by another specific definition of “refugee” in the same OED Online entry, in

which the term is used to refer to “[a] Protestant who fled France to seek refuge

elsewhere from religious persecution in the 17th and 18th centuries” (“refugee, n.”)

The third definition of “refugee” in the OED Online links early uses of the word

“refugee” with notions of criminality, in that a refugee is “a person who is fleeing from

justice, deserved punishment, etc.; a runaway, a fugitive” (“refugee, n.”) Such a

definition resonates with other early uses of the word and most notably resonates with the Hebraic concept of cities of refuge References to these cities of refuge can be found in the Torah, the Koran, and the Bible Asylum is offered to two groups of people who flee

to cities of refuge: firstly, people who had murdered and were awaiting trial; secondly, people who had inadvertently murdered other people without murderous intent These cities of refuge are set aside so that “every one that killeth any person unawares may flee thither” and are to serve as unbiased safe havens “for the children of Israel, and for the

stranger, and for the sojourner among them” (Authorized King James Version, Num

35.15) Within the boundaries of these cities, the refugee is safe from unjust persecution and revenge until the time of his or her trial The refugee’s physical needs are anticipated and met by these cities of refuge for the presence of this presupposed place of refuge is independent of the existence of refugees

The Impact of World War II

Unlike these versions of the early refugee who are persecuted by religious

dominion or who were accused of criminal intent, the refugee which emerged out of the Second World War is a very different figure Arendt, a German Jew who fled to America

in World War II, wrote of such evolution:

A refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act

committed or some political opinion held Well, it is true we [non-religious Jews] have had to seek refuge; but we committed no acts and most of us never dreamt of having any radical opinion With us the meaning of the term “refugee” has

changed Now “refugees” are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by Refugee

homeland nor a citizen of any country to which he or she may be relocated The refugee perpetually seeks refuge because of his or her status of constant transience

This marker of flight is at the core of the name itself: the verb, “refuge” forms the

word “refugee.” OED Online traces its etymology to “se réfugier” (“to take refuge”) and

“refuir” (“to flee”) (“refuge, v.”), indicating that refugees take refuge in the act of fleeing Michael Quinion, a linguist who has collaborated with the Oxford English Dictionary, also notes that “refugee” has its roots in the Latin word, “refugium,” which means “a place of refuge, in which the core is fugere, to flee” From the etymology, we begin to see

how the modern-day refugee finds refuge in nature of flight and how naturalization and repatriation are not always achievable aims

The most significant event to shape the modern-day understanding of refugee is the Second World War During the war, the Nazis sought to eradicate the Jewish people and anyone who was sympathetic towards the Jews They aimed to do so not because the Jews had committed a crime but simply because they were Jewish The Jews were

targeted and persecuted because of their ethnicity In Nazi Germany, Jews were

conceived of as less than human and thus undeserving of life in Aryan Germany People who were found to be sympathetic to Jews were persecuted At the same time, millions of forced laborers were brought into the Nazi-controlled regions of Europe to work, adding

to the number of stateless people who found that they could not return to their home countries after the war

The German nationalist philosophies that gave rise to the totalitarian Nazi policies and their barbaric treatment of the Jews must also be considered and are well-described in the article, “Lazarus Bendavid’s and J G Fichte’s Kantian Fantasies of Jewish

Decapitation in 1793.” Sven-Erik Rose, the author, writes that both Bendavid and Fichte theorized that “the only way to accommodate Jews into the civil sphere was through the paradoxical and gruesome means of (symbolic) decapitation” (73), in order to distinguish

between the “enlightened Mensch1” and the “backward and timorous Jews” (77) Both

Bendavid and Fichte helped to create a perception of the Jew as the un-Mensch figure

who is without integrity or honor Rose asserts, based on Bendavid’s argument of how

“the Jews turned, as a last resort, to a moral attack, hoping to regain their lost homeland not by might but rather through moral improvement” (77), that it is this specter of a lost homeland and the failure of the Jewish moral war that led the Germans to perceive the Jews as a morally faulty race Because the Jews were perceived to be morally faulty and therefore inhuman, such a perception provided a legitimate basis upon which the

Germans were to “[sever] from the collective monster of the Jewish people by a force so absolute in its violence that it paradoxically obliterates any traces of its violence:

decapitation” (90) Fichte’s argument is similar To Fichte, Jews were “ineligible for inclusion in the civil contract of the larger state” and “the only means [Fichte could] see for including the Jews in the civil contract would be to cut off their heads and to replace them with different heads totally free of Jewish ideas” (90) These anti-Semitic

philosophies formed the basis of Nazism, an anti-Semitic political party and school of thought that sought to exclude Jews from civil society, human rights and life

Two examples help to illustrate the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany The first, Joshua Hagen’s study of “The Most German of Towns: Creating an Ideal Nazi

Community in Rothenburg ob der Tauber,” reveals how anti-Semitism reached its

pinnacle in Nazism:

1 “Mensch” is the German word for “a person of integrity or rectitude; a person who is morally just,  honest, or honourable” (“Mensch, n.”). 

Less than one year after beginning to reframe the tourist experience, historical preservation, and consumer culture in Rothenburg, a racial cleansing program began to crystallize around the same themes of cleanliness, purity, and national belonging First local leaders rewrote the history of Rothenburg’s Jewish community to conform to Nazi thinking Anti-Semitism was then incorporated into the town’s medieval architecture before finally turning directly against the Jewish community (219)

From this excerpt, we can see how Jews were first barred from participating in the

Rothenburg community’s activities in the build-up to the Holocaust These Jews were then written out of their local history before finally being expelled from the place

altogether (221) Rothenburg became the example for other towns in Germany to follow

The second example is Art Spiegelman’s two-volume graphic novel, Maus Maus

tells of the experiences of Art’s father, Vladek Spiegelman, and how he survives

Auschwitz to live out his old age in America All the Jews depicted in the graphic novel

are drawn as mice and the opening quote to the second volume, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,

II: And Here My Troubles Began, explains why:

“Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot

be the ideal type of animal Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!”

– newspaper article, Pomerania, Germany, mid-1930s (3)

In representing Jews as mice that are distinctly not as cute and animated as Mickey Mouse, the gritty depiction forces readers of the graphic novel to recognize that Jews are

not mice They are human beings that are individuals just like anyone else At the same

time, the depiction also references the legacy of Nazism on Jewish history – the Jews could be conceived of as mice during the Holocaust because of the highly problematic mapping of Jews onto the space outside of humanity The Jews, in being relegated to a place outside of humanity, foreshadow the modern-day refugee and his peripheral status

in his persecution and displacement

The Jew’s citizenship was ineffectual and his right to life eventually consumed in

an atmosphere of nationalist fervor These Jews were subjected to violent relocation and genocide, even though they had “committed no acts and most of [them] never dreamt of having any radical opinion” (Arendt, “We” 110) In their innocence, the Jewish people fled their inhospitable homes to all parts of the world, crossing many international and national borders Far evolved from the early refugee described above, these Jews are not criminals and they do not oppose the dominant religious order of their home countries They are born into the wrong place at the wrong time and – forcibly displaced, innocent, and persecuted – have become the model of the modern-refugee upon which

contemporary refugee policies are centered

In the emergent world order after the Second World War, countries all around the world sat down in what was to become the United Nations (hereafter known as UN) and

its Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (hereafter shortened to Convention) In

this new era, the refugee becomes someone who have been innocently persecuted and displaced, and who, in the process of displacement, has become a political figure that

remarks upon a country’s conscience After all, even though the 1951 Convention set out

a widely accepted definition of refugee and even though the 1967 Protocol has expanded the Convention to become applicable worldwide limited only by the member countries of

the UN, this definition has since been contested and refined by international law and individual countries time and time again However, it is worthwhile to revisit the original

UN definitions to further understand the figure of the refugee

The United Nations and the Modern Refugee

The UN, formed after World War II in 1945 as a group of 51 countries who were

“committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights” (“UN at a Glance”), had the immediate problem of helping the many refugees that were spilled over from the war Besides the Jews, there were also the millions of forced

laborers who were brought out of their countries to work all over Germany and Nazi Europe to fuel the war economy Mark Spoerer and Jochen Fleischhacker, in “Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany: Categories, Numbers, and Survivors,” note how the scale of civilian forced labor was immensely increased in World War II, in that “[t]he German occupants lured or deported several million foreign civilians, POWs, and

concentration-camp inmates into the Reich to support the German war economy” (171) These forced laborers were deported to Germany as a result of Nazi expansion across Europe and the bulk of them lived and worked in harrowing circumstances They were kept alive only because of “the German economy’s urgent need of manpower [which] retarded their immediate and complete destruction” (171) On the Pacific side of the war, Japan had also forcibly amassed large numbers of Asian civilians to support the war

These workers were denied the option of returning home or leaving for a more hospitable land After the war, many of these forced laborers were unable to return to their countries because of reasons such as “postwar antisemitism” or because their home countries were

“directly or indirectly controlled by Joseph Stalin’s USSR” (181) On the other hand, many of these workers were no longer recognized as civil members of postwar Germany All these people added to the displaced and stateless numbers that emerged from the Second World War

The existence of Jews and forced laborers as refugees and displaced persons

resulted in the creation of the UNHCR and the Convention which includes as its primary

condition the Article stating that “the term ‘refugee’ shall apply to any person who [a]s a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951” (14) and that “the words ‘events occurring before 1 January 1951’ shall be understood to mean either: (a) ‘events occurring in Europe before 1 January 1951’; or (b) ‘events occurring in Europe or

elsewhere before 1 January 1951’” (14-5) The subsequent Protocol removed this virtual

timestamp and extended the term “refugee” to include people displaced in events outside

of 1 January 1951 This expansion of the people the term includes only reinforces the extent of conflict, persecution and displacement taking place worldwide in the 20th century and beyond

In World War II, refugee Jews who were unable to participate outwardly in civil society in the Nazi-controlled regions of Europe as a result of anti-Semitism and the forced laborers who had no free will sought asylum in countries such as the United States and Switzerland This unprecedented wave of refugees swamped the world and as a result, the United Nations set up the UNHCR in 1950 to “help the Europeans displaced

by [World War II]” (“History of UNHCR”) At the beginning, the UNHCR was only meant to be a temporary unit but its presence became long-term when the United Nations recognized the then-emerging and fast-growing numbers of refugees who were displaced

by post-World War II conflicts (“History of UNHCR”) It is out of the UNHCR that the

1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol emerged

These two documents mark the first formal international agreement on how refugees are to be treated They also mark the first formal international description of the refugee identity, however impersonal the description is According to the introductory note by the UNHCR, “[as of 2010], there are 147 State Parties to one or both of these

instruments” (Convention 5) These State Parties are countries from all over the world and their endorsement of the Convention and Protocol signifies a landmark meeting point

between the international agreement and each individual country’s national policy on the treatment of refugees The resultant impact of such a meeting is that “refugee” is now a status that is accorded to individuals who seek refuge in a foreign country and who agree

to become a product of international and national law

Politically, socially, and legally, the refugee is now a figure firmly entrenched within the international society In doing so, however, the refugee’s right to individuality

is compromised The refugee is a generic statistic among numbers of displaced people around the world In order to be recognized as a refugee, a person has to apply for

validation from the UNHCR and undergo a series of interviews to prove that he qualifies for the category of “refugee.” This “refugee” is the figure that will be aided by member

countries of the UN Yet, every country has different interpretations of the Convention and Protocol and every country expects differently of its refugees

It is impossible to try and formulate a single type of refugee whom all nations will accept, because refugee policies vary from nation to nation and from time to time However, it is possible to identify common traits (starting with the UN documents) before a country will recognize an asylum seeker as a refugee One notable way in which we can interpret the refugee is how international law demands that nations offer refuge to all refugees

Countries are asked to extend the “core principle of non-refoulement” (Convention 4) to

each refugee, in that:

Governments continue to receive refugees in their territories and that they act in concert in a true spirit of international cooperation in order that these refugees

may find asylum and the possibility of resettlement (Convention 11)

Non-refoulement “is understood in international law as a duty of a state not to return a

person to a place of persecution” (Boed 27) While in words this principle of

non-refoulement seems ideal, in reality, however, non-non-refoulement “only compels a state not

to return a person to a place where he or she would be persecuted but leaves the state free

to send him or her elsewhere” (Boed 50) In short, the principle of non-refoulement protects the refugee from having to return to his or her inhospitable country of origin where his or her life is under threat but does not prevent the refugee from being subjected

to the national demands the place from which he or she seeks asylum

National governments protest against fully assimilating too many refugees into their societies under the guise of protecting their citizens’ rights and livelihoods Many countries fear that an influx of refugees will cause civil unrest National law, caught between the nation’s social ethics of trying to uphold human rights and that same nation’s

political self-interests of preserving its citizen’s privileges, requires that refugees first declare themselves as people seeking asylum, before subjecting all asylum-seekers to a process of investigation of the validity of their declaration The result of such a process is often controversial, as Joy Purcell notes in “A Right to Leave, but Nowhere to Go:

Reconciling an Emigrant’s Right to Leave with the Sovereign’s Right to Exclude.” She identifies a compelling case study which reveals how the internationally accepted

Convention and Protocol, alongside similar international documents, fall short of

addressing the refugee problem worldwide:

[W]hile asylum applicants fleeing [persecution] may gain the sympathy of the United States, they will not gain admission Rather, individuals seeking to

emigrate in order to find a better life are labeled “economic migrants” and quickly denied refugee status Therefore, the millions living in countries stricken by famine or civil war would not qualify as refugees under the standard used by the majority of countries today (199)

Simply put, asylum applicants to the United States are considered economic migrants and

not refugees, and are therefore not protected by ideals such as non-refoulement Yet, the United States is listed among the “[m]ajor refugee hosting countries” (Global Trends

2010 14) in the world and hosts hundreds of thousands of refugees each year This

discrepancy between Purcell’s findings and the UNHCR statistical report bears out Jerzy Sztucki’s examination of the political problems of individual countries apply the

Convention and Protocol intra-nationally

In “Who is a Refugee? The Convention Definition: Universal or Obsolete?,” Sztucki postulates through the French representation in the Economic and Social Council

of the United Nations (ECOSOC) that “obligations flowing from the Convention were such that the day might come when certain countries might find it impossible to honour

them” (57) The Convention and Protocol requires States who are receiving refugees to

provide these refugees with the same treatment “as is accorded to aliens generally,”

“[e]xcept where this Convention contains more favourable provisions” (Convention 17),

but countries, under the excuse of upholding their national security or ensuring the best interests of the refugee, often do not follow suit

Recalling Purcell’s article, the Convention and Protocol have sparked many

debates over which are the refugees who can access the rights to the protection of

refugees that are laid out in the Convention and the Protocol The debates carry on in

Refugee Rights and Realities: Evolving International Concepts and Regimes, where

Frances Nicholson and Patrick Twomey edit a collect of papers on “the rights of refugees and asylum seekers and the often contrasting reality of the practice of states and other

actors in this area” (1) Anny Bayefsky edits another volume titled Human Rights and

Refugees, Internally Displaced Persons and Migrant Workers, in which various authors

similarly negotiate the lack in the Convention and Protocol, the problematic application

of the UNHCR documents to a real-life context, as well as how the standards of due process can be set out These voices point towards one major area of consideration when

it comes to determining a usable understanding of “refugee” – despite the general

agreement that refugees flee from persecution and seek help, the actual definitions of

“persecution” and “help” vary from place to place and time to time The fluidity of the

refugee’s silhouette is such that many countries only take in “suitable” refugees that benefit them The modern-day refugee is someone who, in flight from a persecuted homeland, must be defined by the UNHCR and the respective country from which

asylum has been sought Thus, refugees sit at the bottom of the immigrant ladder below two other widely accepted people movement categories: the immigrant and the exile

The Immigrant and the Exile

Set against the refugee, the immigrant can be thought of as the ideal incoming person to the host society to fill gaps in the manpower infrastructure of the host society Ranging from the rich expatriate professional to the low income hard laborer, these people migrate because of the economic opportunities open to them, out of choice

Furthermore, their option to return home is an open one While some may argue that the poorer immigrants may not have the financial ability to return home, I assert that these immigrants can undo their migration because their countries of origin have not become inhospitable towards them One of the trends of migration – circular migration – entails

an eventual return to the country of origin (“Circular Migration”), an option that many immigrants keep open because they are keen to maximize both the opportunities available

to them in the host country as well as the country of origin Thus, the immigrant is able to access a more permanent and elevated position within the host society due to an ability to plan for and to secure competent modes of entry into the new country

On the other hand, refugees have no way of knowing when or whether their countries of origin will ever become hospitable towards them Also, should refugees return to their homelands, they will go back to devastation because they were chased out

of their homes with great violence and destruction In “Refugees, Immigrants, and the State,” Jeremy Hein distinguishes between “planned migration by immigrants and

spontaneous flight by the refugees” (55), because refugees do not have a choice about and cannot plan their travel patterns They flee at an instant, without knowing where they will end up at Unlike the immigrant, the refugee is someone who is taken because of his

or her pathetic situation and is more often than not told to be grateful for the charity that

is being extended to him or her

Unlike the immigrant, exiles are also pushed out of their homelands to seek a dwelling place elsewhere However, exiles and refugees are vastly different in that:

Exile originated in the age-old practice of banishment Once banished, the exile lives an anomalous and miserable life, with the stigma of being an outsider Refugees, on the other hand, are a creation of the twentieth-century state The word “refugee” has become a political one, suggesting large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance, whereas “exile carries with it, [Said thinks], a touch of solitude and spirituality.” (Said, “Reflections,” 181)

Said’s remarks raise crucial contradistinctions between a refugee and an exile Firstly, he asserts that a refugee is a twentieth-century construct while an exile dates much further back in history, because an exile is barred from return by a formal act of expulsion

whereas refugees are driven out suddenly in massive droves Secondly, he asserts that the refugee is a construct void of the solitude and spirituality of an exile Said’s second assertion has been earlier examined to some extent, in that refugees are a political

construct (as a result of the Convention and Protocol) that is a part of the international

community, a construct that is modulated by international and national law These

refugees are created by the need to deal with the overflow of displaced persons after World War II and are not considered individuals with rights beyond those of a refugee The exile writer, on the other hand, translates his or her experiences to share with the rest

of the world and is marked by a restlessness from the need to be continually on the run in

“a life permanently ‘out of place,’ suspended in perpetual exile” (Zeleza 3), far unlike the refugee whose right to speak as an individual is compromised by his or her acquiescence

to being considered a figure of overflow There can be no spirituality or solitude as a statistic of a political category

The historical weight of the exile – the “age-old practice of banishment” (Said,

“Reflections” 181) – is what places the exile above the law The exile may have been banished by his or her country but he or she can relocate elsewhere After all, a single figure is less threatening (as a whole) than a whole population of people when it comes to seeking asylum in a host country Furthermore, an exile is not without his or her

followers In the case of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, one of the most famous exiles of the last decade, he was accused of rampant corruption and was ousted in

a military coup in 2006 Since then, he has relocated to Dubai However, Thaksin still has

a strong political base in Thailand that supports him While Thaksin may have been exiled from Thailand, he still has the moral superiority, the mark of “solitude and

spirituality” (Said, “Reflections” 181), to be a figure that is larger than life unto the masses that support him Banishment made Thaksin a more revered figure because it validated all his actions such that he carries with him the dignity of a political figure

whose acts of wrongdoing led to his banishment but whose all other good acts lend him the clout and power to prevent Thai law from prosecuting him without inciting civil unrest (Beech)

In measuring the refugee against the immigrant and the exile, we come to realize

that the modern-day refugee is marked by a beginning in the UNHCR 1951 Convention and is a “created consistency, that regular constellation of ideas” (Said, Orientalism, 5)

This consistency is the amalgamated whole of the refugees that is represented in all discourses regarding refugees and it is this same whole that seeks asylum and refuge each time a refugee tries to find refuge in a host country However, we need to ask if these discourses on refugees that we have looked at, among other legal and political definitions

of refugees, have presented an acceptable standard of who or what refugees are to the international community We also need to question if national standards are acceptable,

as a foundation upon which a citizen’s understanding of what a refugee is, is based

Media

There is a revealing commentary in Spike Lee’s documentary, When the Levees

Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, which shows how the media tries to shape who refugees

are and how people repeat these mediated impressions In the chapter, “American

Citizens,” victims from Hurricane Katrina react against being called refugees, one of them asking if, “when Hurricane Katrina blew away [his] home, did it blow away [his] citizenship too?” (Lee) The media position in describing these victims as refugees is a highly controversial one, a position deftly examined by Adeline Masquelier in “Why Katrina’s Victims Aren’t Refugees: Musings on a “Dirty” Word.” She argues that “[t]he

discomfort that so many people in the United States reportedly felt at hearing (or reading about) fellow U.S citizens being called “refugees” was revealing of their self-image” (736) Masquelier adds that the image that is under threat by labeling Americans as refugees is an image of “power, prosperity, and self-sufficiency,” “testimony to the vitality of the ‘American dream’” (736) In creating this image of despair in which the American dream came “under threat” (736), the media was pointing to the lack of aid and the slowness of response to the victims; however, the victims themselves, repeating an instilled understanding of refugees as foreign, without government and not from

America, balked against such a label Many of these voices who wish to shape an

individual’s conception of “refugee” lie in the public domain of the mass media

Television news channels broadcast images of broken African and Middle Eastern people huddled in desert camps, of Angelina Jolie in a patterned headscarf and her brood

of international children, of individuals seeking members of their families who were left behind Newspapers report on war-torn countries whose citizens have left in massive droves, on illegal immigrants who sneak across borders, on voluntary repatriation Far from being flippant, what I am trying to show here is how newspapers and television broadcasts (and even radio, though to a lesser extent) contribute to our understanding of what a refugee is These images appeal to the receiver’s compassion and emotion and this pathetic figure of the refugee is usually what gets perpetuated alongside the national and international policies on sympathetic treatment of the refugee Jerzy Sztucki asserts, quite rightly, that:

Formally, the determination of refugee status is declaratory, not constitutive, in character: a person does not become a refugee as a consequence of recognition, but is recognised because he or she is a refugee (70-1)

People who are persecuted have to go through many stages of interviews and applications

in order to be recognized as a refugee and relocated to a safer place to live In the process

of seeking asylum, refugees lose their rights as individuals and become statistics whose immediate needs are basic healthcare, food and shelter As viewers of the moving image and readers of print, we very seldom get to interact directly with a refugee without

encountering the many intermediate layers that filter our conception of what a refugee is Beyond these digital and print representations of a refugee, the few who get to interact personally with refugees are moderated by human rights institutions such as

peacekeepers, humanitarian aid workers and even social workers By the time refugees are accepted into a host country to live, they have already been configured by these multiple layers of perception Bearing in mind the constructed-ness of the refugee – without discounting the horrific experiences and vast sufferings the refugee has

undergone and likely still faces – we come to realize that our knowledge of the refugee is impacted by these preconceived notions of these people fleeing persecution and their histories, policies and philosophies

Who is the Refugee?

Who is really a refugee? International law is watered down, modified, and at times violated by individual nations in their deliberate recognition of a select type of refugee that fits in with their internal ideals, while national law and policies become tools

for the execution of segregating “good” refugees from “bad ones.” Also, we see how a refugee, unlike an immigrant or an exile, is unable to represent himself or herself once he

or she seeks asylum, because the host nation or receiving body needs to determine if he

or she poses a threat to (national) security and whether the claim to refugee status is a legitimate one The mass media then adds to the shaping of refugees in the public sphere, figuring the refugee for a specific report or purpose In the midst of so much noise, the figure of the refugee is a very quiet, pathetic one, because the refugee individual is lost against the legal, political, and media representations

Returning to Arendt, she suggests that we can find out the refugee “identity” if we listen to “the “truth” that refugees tell” (“We” 119) I will like to suggest that it is in the realm of literary fiction that we can find such truth, away from the factual demands of political, social, academic, and legal documents and their claims to authenticity and accuracy The next chapter will begin with a section on the difficulties of representation

in refugee literature Then, there will be a close examination of two types of writings on refugees: UNHCR documents produced to raise awareness about UNHCR activities and a

novel, What is the What These case studies will explore the various strategies of

fictionality that are employed in the works of fiction to suggest that the refugee identity is greatly enriched by retellings through the framework of fiction

Chapter 3: What is Refugee Literature?

Listening to the Refugee Speak: Difficulties of Representation

All kinds of refugee works have permeated the English-reading public As these next examples show, there is an increasing amount of refugee literature and other works

of fiction which are all produced in this past decade Such literature reaches out to a wide range of audiences and indicates the extent to which refugee issues have filtered into our everyday lives One type of literature – literature produced by the UNHCR – attempts to educate the public on refugee issues In 2007, the Public Affairs department of the

UNHCR published and freely distributed a thin booklet on Refugee Children: Escape

from Persecution and War (hereafter shortened to Refugee Children 2007) The booklet,

brightly colored and informally decorated with pictures of little clay figures and

handwritten typescript, caught the attention of educators and school-going children

Refugee Children 2007 is the third installment; in 2000, the UNHCR had previously

released Refugee Children: Escape from Persecution and War (hereafter shortened to

Refugee Children 2000) and in 1999, Refugee Teenagers: Escape from Persecution and War (hereafter shortened to Refugee Teenagers) Refugee Teenagers (Talbot) enjoyed a

reprint in 2001 Besides these booklets, Lesson Modules on refugee experiences have also been created and published on the UNHCR website Both the booklets and the Lesson Modules are for teachers to use in classrooms and lectures to promote the work of the UNHCR

In 2006, David Eggers published a novel, What is the What: A Novel, which, on the inside cover, contradictorily claims to be “The Autobiography of Valentino Achak

Deng.” Eggers collaborated with Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese Lost Boy who

eventually escaped to America to tell a fictionalized version of his life story in this novel The book draws attention to the plight of these Lost Boys who have relocated to the United States and one result of the book is the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation

(hereafter shortened to VAD Foundation), which aims to “[help] members of the southern

Sudanese diaspora in the United States,” “[rebuild] southern Sudanese communities,” and

“[improve] U.S policy toward Sudan” (“Mission Statement”) The latter part of this essay will examine this work in detail as a work of refugee literature, but, suffice to say for the moment, it is yet another example of refugee literature that has permeated public consciousness

There are many other such examples, including Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite

Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, Katherine Paterson’s The Day of the Pelican,

Mary Williams’s Brothers in Hope: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Ishmael Beah’s

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, and Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s I, Rigoberta Menchú, An Indian Woman in Guatemala The audiences that these different works of

literature reach point towards a burgeoning awareness of the widespread problem of refugees worldwide From the widely televised collapse of the New York Twin Towers which sparked off the war on terror to the newspaper reports on the outpouring of

refugees from civil wars in Africa and Afghanistan to the books, films, and reports made about these events, we are not allowed to forget that refugees exist

Despite the variety of examples given above and the different people that they reach out to, they all share in common the focus on representing refugee experiences They deliberately seek out the refugee and attempt, to varying abilities, to communicate the refugee experience to their intended audience All of the examples, with their focus

on refugee experiences, revolve around the figure of the refugee, a figure that occupies the peripheries of fiction and representation elsewhere in other literature

The importance of understanding the refugee experience cannot be

overemphasized We live in a world where refugee numbers are increasing constantly A direct consequence is that many refugees live in refugee camps or are relocated to new

countries and live in new communities The UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2009 reports

that the total number of refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced persons has increased from 42 million to 43.3 million from 2008 to 2009 and that these numbers do not include people who have been displaced by natural disasters (10) The discourses that form around the refugee can be divided into the two main areas of refugee relief and refugee studies and are heavily influenced by national policies, the UNHCR, and the news media As a result, what we know about the refugee is statistical and sociopolitical, through the information provided by social workers, relief agencies, politicians, and policymakers in the form of reports, demographic data and policies Articles such as Joy Purcell’s “A Right to Leave, but Nowhere to Go: Reconciling an Emigrant’s Right to Leave with the Sovereign’s Right to Exclude” and Liisa Malkki’s “Refugees and Exile: From Refugee Studies” to the National Order of Things” examine the figure of the

refugee against international and national policies and practices to consider the

anthropological implications of displacement that refugees undergo Carol Mortland’s

“Transforming Refugees in Refugee Camps” and Harold Koh’s “Who are the Archetypal

“Good Aliens?” look at the status of a refugee when he exits from a refugee camp into a host society “A Mixed Methods Study of Refugee Families Engaging in Multiple-Family Groups” (Steven Weine et al) is a social science study on the transitions, trauma and adjustment difficulties From these examples, we can infer how the articles about

refugees largely focus on the physical and sociopolitical needs and demands of the

refugee Yet, few articles give us insight into how a refugee, as a speaking individual, might feel about his or her experience and what he or she has to say about it

When we look more closely at refugee writing and writings about refugees, we can learn more about the figure of the refugee, the refugee experience and the resultant responses to such people and their life experiences than the statistical and technical terms policies and social articles produce In “Listen to My Picture,” Lisa Brunick observes the poetry written by a young child in her class Though little Maja is only in grade school and is still encountering English poetry, she presents her audience with an insightful and delicate glimpse of the devastating break that refugees like her experience when they are suddenly and forcefully displaced In her poetry, images of “little birds,” “goldfishes” and a “funny dog” (qtd in Brunick 14; 3-5) reflect the period of innocence that was destroyed in the conflict The images of “guns” and “sea” (qtd in Brunick 14; 9-10) point towards the trauma that Maja experienced and the journey she undertook to her new home More than just images to symbolize the various parts of her refugee experience, these images open a way for us to sympathize with Maja as a person who is a refugee and

to understand how she continues to miss her interrupted childhood and her lost

hometown Maja finds refuge in poetry as it enables her to express her innermost

feelings Moreover, putting her experiences onto paper displaces them from her for the duration of the poem, allowing us readers, in the act of reading, to undergo these

experiences for ourselves

However, Maja’s poem is only one level of refugee writing How can we identify what constitutes refugee fiction? More often than not, refugees do not have the luxury of time and money to write stories Many refugees who resettle in English-speaking

countries do not have a good command of the English language and are struggling to make ends meet Even if the refugee experience is written and published, the stories are put to different uses Maja’s poem is fairly untouched, because it was meant for a grade school project and nothing more Yet, Brunick’s use of Maja’s poem in her article already shades the poem to bear more meaning that it had started out with – now, Maja’s poem is evidence in the academic discussion on how art is a tool for refugees to express

themselves with

Every refugee experience is different and individual At the same time, there are common themes such as displacement, trauma, hope, and community that run through these refugee stories Identifying the refugee experience as a central concern of the

refugee novel is only a starting point for us to begin to understand refugee fiction and how it is However, the sooner we recognize the wealthy resources of refugee literature that exist, the sooner we will be able to understand why critical knowledge of refugee literature is crucial to our very existence of mankind and its society

In the process of representing the refugee experience, there are many difficulties

in representing refugees Benjamin Zephaniah, a British writer, wrote a poem about his experience with “a judge saying to a Roma woman from Poland that, although he did believe her story that she had been repeatedly gang-raped, he couldn’t accept her claim for asylum because rape is not a form of persecution” (qtd in Schmid, Harris, and

Sexton) Zephaniah reacts to the gross misinterpretation of persecution that led to the disjuncture between the reality articulated by the Roma woman and the legal verdict the judge handed to the woman in his poem, “Appeal Dismissed.” The poem highlights the unjust treatment the woman received from the judge:

You have been a victim of an act of depravity

And you may never love again,

Nevertheless you have only been raped

And in the books that I have read

Rape does not constitute torture,

Not within the ordinary meaning of the word,

So go home

And take your exceptional circumstances with you (“Article”; 28-35)

In Zephaniah’s poem, the Roma woman is unable to represent herself in the court of law, because her request to claim asylum requires her to give up the right to represent herself When the judge changes gang rape into something far less than the kind of torture that justifies refugee status, she is unable to counter The judge ignores that she was raped because she is Roma and female, and refuses to grant her asylum As a result, the Roma woman becomes just another statistic who does not fit into “the books” (“Article”; 31) and has to go back to where she will continue to undergo severe persecution “Appeal Dismissed” brings out the often unnoticed oppression and suppression that refugees face

at the hands of superior political, legal, and social figures More importantly, the poem also highlights the lack of compassion and sympathy such formal figures like the judge bear for their fellow humankind On the other hand, because Zephaniah chose to write about this case of mistreatment in a poem, readers are aware of the plight of the Roma woman and can sympathize with her

One of the largest difficulties of representing the refugee experience arguably is the difficulty of representing from the outside The refugee embodies all that is alien and threatening To acknowledge a refugee and all that he represents would be to

acknowledge simultaneously that the world order is leaking and that man is killing man

on a larger scale than ever It would also be to recognize that there are other human beings (just like all of us with “inalienable” human rights) who can be stripped of their so-called “inalienable” rights and rendered impotent The anxiety the citizen faces in the presence of a refugee is perhaps the biggest motivator in the political and legal arenas to

be condescendingly tolerant of the refugee without compromising the host society’s superior position To allow the refugee to speak is to blur the lines between citizen and alien, non-persecuted and persecuted, strong and weak Given that the refugee is a highly politicized figure, is it possible to examine the refugee in a non-political arena? We return

to Maja’s poem, a poem which is very revealing in how the condition of being a refugee

is not conceived of as a political or an international construct, but is seen as a historical consequence of war

From Maja’s poem, we can infer that the individual refugee is more often

concerned with what is lost and gained in the process of becoming a refugee and with the ability to express such losses and gains for other people to understand, as Maja “[wishes she] remembered what [she] forgot” (qtd in Brunick 14; 13-4) Similarly, the website,

Iraqi Refugee Stories, is the project of a videojournalist, Jennifer Utz According to the

website, “[t]he idea behind Iraqi Refugee Stories emerged from an interest in creating an intimate oral history of the refugees displaced from Iraq, who currently number more than 5 million” (“About Iraqi”) This notion of a history that exists, that is not formalized

or officiated, furthers why it is important to examine the figure of the refugee from a position that is removed from an overtly politicized arena Even though “[o]ne in five Iraqis is now without a permanent home, yet rarely are their voices heard” (“About”), despite Utz’s website collating these stories In order to ensure that the refugees are able

to share their experiences without being displaced by political opinions and concerns, the refugee experiences have to be shared in a realm that is neither too steeped in politics nor too far removed such that the experiences shared discount to nothing Fiction offers the possibility of such a realm

Literary Texts: the Power to Question Doxologies

The OED Online’s etymology for “literature” includes the Latin word “litterātūra

,” which refers to the “use of letters, writing, system of letters, alphabet, instruction in

reading and writing, writings, scholarship,” as well as the French word “littérature,”

which refers to “knowledge acquired from reading or studying books, learning, erudition”

(literature, n.”) The literary segment of literature draws from these two meanings – the

first meaning implies communication and expression while the second meaning implies understanding and awareness – to combine into a form that makes use of the detached transferable symbol of the letter to communicate an understanding from person to person

on a particular subject In between such a negotiation between the inscribed letter and the understanding that the reader draws from reading words on a page, there is a world of publication and circulation which work together to influence the space in which literary fictions exist

To say that a refugee can completely represent himself as himself in a literary space would be to ignore the effects of publication and circulation The editors whom the writer works with, the cover illustrations of the resultant book, the marketing managers who decide when and how to circulate copies of the book – all these factors shape the public reception of what a refugee has to say Moreover, sometimes, the refugee is not the writer or co-writer of the literary work we call refugee literature All the people involved

in the process of creating a book filter the experience that is being communicated

However, it is important to differentiate between the individual experience that is

communicated and the means through which a literary work is produced

Loosely speaking, literature includes just about anything that is in print –

documents, reports, novels, poems, (auto)biographies, letters, and so on However, an encompassing definition of literature does not take into consideration the diverse

all-purposes that the print material is put to For example, reports are authorizing documents that are used to forward scientific theories or give supporting evidence Novels and poems, though they may have been written for historical or social purposes are largely read with pleasure for leisurely purposes Not all literature is accessible by refugees If the political and legal aspects of a society render a refugee insignificant or nonexistent, the refugee cannot access the means to read, let alone write, political or legal literature The refugee cannot produce a UNHCR document, because he does not have the power or access to do so

On the other hand, fiction is far less demanding and provides a broader audience that reads what is being produced As we shall proceed to see in the next section on Wolfgang Iser’s “Fictionalizing: The Anthropological Dimension of Literary Fictions, “

Iser describes fiction as “the storytelling branch of literature” (939) in which “[f]ictions

… are … conditions that enable the production of worlds whose reality … is not to be doubted” (940) This powerful description, of what fiction is, is crucial to our

understanding of the type of writing that the refugee can engage in Literature that does not demand a factual accountability, that does not demand or install a referent, allows the refugee to share of his or her experiences from wherever he or she is Though the refugee

is within the camp outside of normative social structures that first world citizens

instinctively understand, the refugee is still able to create fiction because literary spaces allow storytelling to take place within them The refugee’s border experiences – from being kicked out of his home country to being held in limbo in refugee camps, from being transferred into host societies but not necessarily assimilated into the communities already present, from having undergone a refugee experience that has no equivalent in other spheres of living experiences – can evoke emotions in his readers through the act of fictionalizing, the act of crossing the border from lived reality into evocative nonreality

Even when the refugee is not the author, the literary fiction that is created is still a possibility simply because it is a work of fiction Iser’s model of fiction allows the reader this: instead of looking for facts and weeding out the lies (as legal and political systems are wired to do so), the reader recognizes that the fictitious elements in a text all serve to evoke a reality that a reader has had no experience of and in which the lack of experience does not matter The writer can dispense with factors that do not serve the larger narrative and “endow[his adventures with a meaning which is not inherent in them” (Iser 943) Thus, the literary space in which fictionalizing takes place allows the writer of refugee literature to shape a possible interpretation of the refugee’s story without being caught in

the “real” world of politics, legalities, and fact-finding reports This also enables refugee

to transgress social norms without committing a crime against society, infusing literary fictions with the power to question doxologies

Article Review: Fictionalizing

Why is there a need to identify this subset of literature, “refugee literature?” Firstly, let as look Wolfgang Iser’s proposal, in “Fictionalizing: The Anthropological Dimension of Literary Fictions,” that the very nature of fiction allows for the “linking [of] beginning and end together in order to create one last possibility through which the end, even if it cannot be overstepped, may at least be illusively postponed” (954) With

an understanding of Iser’s schematic, I will then define two crucial notions – “literary fiction” and “refugee literature” – that underline the difference between reports of the refugee experience and literary representations of refugee experiences

Iser opens his paper with the observation that fiction, though often associated with

“the storytelling branch of literature,” is also “what Dr Johnson called “a falsehood; a lye.” (939) This duality of natures within the act of communication, whether of a work of literature or of a matter of intent, arises from one same process – overstepping, which he defines as the process where “the lie oversteps the truth, and the literary work oversteps the real world which it incorporates” (939) For Iser, overstepping takes place when fictions “talk of that which does not exist, even though they present its nonreality as if it

did exist” (939) Moreover, Iser develops his argument based on Sir Philip Sidney’s

observation that poets do not lie because they do not affirm (939) Iser argues that for literary fictions, unlike lies, the process of overstepping “incorporate[s] an identifiable

reality, subjected to an unforeseeable refashioning” (939) and thus presents both its reality and nonreality alongside each other to its audience Iser calls this process of

overstepping, which takes place in literary fiction, “fictionalizing” (939)

Iser then spends the rest of his essay discussing fictionalizing as “a means of actualizing the possible in order to address the question why human beings, in spite of their awareness that literature is make-believe, seem to stand in need of fictions” (939-40) We will continue to study Iser’s paper, but we must bear in mind a question that develops upon Iser’s thesis: why should human beings be aware of and stand in need of refugee fictions? However, let us first take a detailed look at the process of fictionalizing

Iser argues that “[f]ictions are, rather, conditions that enable the production of worlds whose reality, in turn, is not to be doubted” (940) Each and every one of these worlds is a reality that is imagined and a possibility that is explored These worlds of nonreality that are imagined and explored are not ungrounded falsehoods Instead, fiction

is tethered to human lives and interactions through its “functions, that is, the

manifestations of its use and the products resulting from it” (941)

Because fiction is defined through its functions, Iser questions “what they appear

to be like, what they achieve, and what they reveal in literature” (941) He turns to

pastoral poetry for an example For Iser, there is in pastoral romance “two radically different worlds [which] are telescoped: the artificial and the sociopolitical [and] these two diverging realities can be gauged from the fact that there is a sharp dividing line between them” (941) In order for either reality to be breached, characters must be

“doubled” (941) through the use of disguises As Iser points out, “[t]he shepherds do not

represent the rustic life of the country, but are only the trappings for staging something whose reference is no longer given and therefore has to be conceived” (942) This lack of reference in the world of the artificial and the need to breach the world of the

sociopolitical in order to have meaning gives rise to what fiction is: fiction “brings about

a simultaneity of what is mutually exclusive” (941) At the same time, the sociopolitical must intrude into the world of the artificial within the realm of fiction in order for the

“sharp dividing line” (941) to be crossed because “all references are bracketed and only serve as guidelines for what is to be imagined” (942) In short, the sociopolitical reality is

an equally imagined one as that of the artificial

The simultaneity shared between the artificial and the sociopolitical worlds

enables “manifest meaning [to be] released from what it designates” and “what is said and what is meant can be differently correlated” (944) In short, “a play space opens up between the manifest and latent meaning” such that this “structure of double meaning [becomes] a matrix for generating meaning [through] simultaneous concealment and revelation” (944-5) For Iser, the power of such a play space that exists within literary fictions is that “fictionalizing epitomizes a condition otherwise unattainable in the ways

in which normal life takes its course” (945) To this end, fictionalizing – that process of creating literary fictions – enables

In the process of creating fictions, we human beings are not present because we are not the characters we create These characters are freed from the frames of reference that human beings exist within They are, instead, the “constant enactment of self-

fashioning [which] never encounters any restrictions” (948-9) The characters created represent limitless extensions of ourselves in the nonreality of fiction Iser calls the world