“The expectation projected upon the refugee is that the past is less relevant than the future…”

Book Review

The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, Edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Abrams Press, 2018.

Viet Thanh Nguyen has become perhaps the most eloquent voice of the past decade of the immigrant experience in the United States.  Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Sympathizer (2016) stakes out a very particular angle on the Vietnam war and challenges all Americans who think they know the meaning of that war to think again. Philip Caputo’s 2015 New York Times' book review described the book as "giving voice to the previously voiceless [in other words the Vietnamese perspective] while it compels the rest of us to look at the events of 40 years ago in a new light." Nguyen is Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.  The Sympathizer was followed in 2016 by Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, an account of the way the Vietnam War has been remembered, and in 2021 by The Committed, a sequel to The Sympathizer.  

In The Displaced, published in 2018, Nguyen has gathered the essays of twenty-one refugee writers in the United States who capture the texture of the refugee experience.

The book is filled with heart-pulling refugee moments: The glowing flash when a twenty-year-old girl in a refugee camp receives a brand new turquoise dress with a lace collar, specially extracted for her by one kind woman from a pile of used clothing donated to the camp;  The heroic Hmong children who venture outside the Thai camp to collect greens for their younger siblings, paying the price of subsequent fury not because of the wrath of the enemy but because of their parents’ terror - they linger in the minds of the other children as “the real warriors;”  The Iranian refugee child whose teacher helps her make a papier maché topographical map of the United States - when the child explains that she has recently arrived and knows little about her new country the teacher responds “Oh, sweetie, you must be so grateful;” The Palestinian who underlines that his loss is not only the loss of home, but of his “entire country.”

The refugee as orphan, stripped of extended family, homeland, and agency; the refugee as actor, assimilating to be accepted, but knowing all the time assimilation is another word for performance; the refugee assuming a dual identity – one person at work, another at home; the refugee as ghost, invisible, particularly to those who do not accept her.

Even the most liberal amongst those living in host countries must be made thoughtful by the requirements and pressures that the refugee experience places upon newcomers.  The call from the so-called “host community” for gratitude, a condition of acceptance, scarcely camouflages the American need for smug self-satisfaction, our need to feel we are better than others.  The burdensome requirement to be exceptional to overcome the newcomer’s sense that those they meet see them as a statistic and nothing more. 

The refugee possesses a special relationship with the past, these writers tell us.  On the one hand, the past contains the loss, the wounds, the trauma of departure.  It represents an “incomplete narrative,” a ghostly sense that there is more to be known and understood in order to reach a sense of coherent identity.   And so the refugee sustains a “repetitive wounding,” says Chris Abani, born in Nigeria, now professor of English at Northwestern University.  But the expectation projected upon the refugee is that the past is less relevant than the future.  And so the refugee has a special relationship with time itself – you are always a refugee, while gradually no longer perceived as a refugee. Instead, he says, you are “a stutter in time-space, always repeating… unable to return and unable to truly settle or belong anywhere else.”

Refugees create an uncomfortable feeling for Americans, argues Abani, not so much because they are strangers per se, but because they awaken Americans’ fears that the stability of the state is an illusion, that any American could become a refugee themselves far more easily than they wish to believe.  Refugees arouse guilt at our misleading sense of well-being and suggest that our compassion is shallower than we would like to think.  They shake up our American consciousness as the nation of immigrants, reminding us that we are in fact a nation of refugees. Not only does each of us have a connection somewhere else, but our story contains more precariousness than many of us wish to admit.  We are thus a nation bent on hiding our fragility at all costs, first from ourselves and then from others.  We try to normalize our environment; we are disturbed by those who lift the curtain. 

Americans want to help refugees…

At a panel discussion on the global migration crisis held last week at Washington, DC’s Newseum, many of the questions from the audience requested practical guidance on how we Americans can help with resettlement. The panelists were less than totally able to answer these questions satisfactorily, a fact that captures at some level the vague cloud that surrounds the US refugee resettlement system. Indeed, an individual who has spearheaded refugee resettlement in New Haven, Connecticut, said in a forum several weeks earlier, run by the Episcopal Church, that when he launched his program, the US State Department advised him to operate “under the radar.” The authorities, it seems, fear that Americans who hear about refugees will be more inclined to push back against their arrival rather than roll up their sleeves to help.

A first step in changing this, according to the global charity Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), is to get the word out about the actual situation of refugees and displaced people worldwide. MSF devoted the past week to informing the people of Washington, DC about the realities of global migration. Timed tickets were available free of charge for a guided tour through an outdoor exhibit on the National Mall, close to the Washington Monument, where we were helped to understand through a number of hands-on re-enactments what it is like to be a refugee or displaced person.

My guide was a nurse from Connecticut in her sixties who has worked for MSF in South Sudan, Burundi and Tanzania and Afghanistan over the past fifteen years. She told us each to select items that we would take in an emergency evacuation. The options were pictured on laminated cards that we could carry with us on the tour. At each stage along our “journey” we were forced to choose one of the items we were carrying to give up for lack of space or sell in order to pay our way on the next stage of the journey. My five items were passport, family photos, medications, baby’s bottle, and water. The item I kept the longest was my passport. A number of my fellow travelers made the same choice. I have no idea whether this was a wise choice. My sense of randomness about it probably replicates the sense of randomness that overshadows most refugees as they try to make good choices hour by hour.

On our tour, we found ourselves in an inflated raft, squeezed closely so that twenty of us could just fit as we sat on the raised edges. Such a boat, we were told, would carry as many as sixty people from Libya or Turkey to Europe. Then we were shown a rudimentary refugee camp, including a latrine, the method by which people wash their hands after using the latrine in a place of water scarcity, and packets of dry peanut butter that can be easily distributed to nourish large numbers on the brink of starvation. In the next tent, a kind of clinic run by MSF, we saw how measles vaccines are kept cold without electricity and we viewed an efficient new malaria test instrument that can be administered to thousands in a single day. We learned the importance of cell phones – essential items for maintaining communication between scattered family members.

I learned that one of the main preoccupations of communities receiving refugees is how to ensure that refugee camps not become permanent dwelling places, in the way that the Palestinian camps have in Southern Lebanon and on the West Bank. Lebanon has not allowed official “camps” for Syrian refugees, so the 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon (now comprising one fifth of Lebanon’s population) are informally camped out in the Bekaa Valley, or renting patches of land closer to cities. The positive aspect of this approach is that the refugees become more integrated in the local economy, and Lebanese as well as refugees gain from the UN aid for the building of infrastructure. But 40 per cent of Syrian refugees in Lebanon live in temporary accommodation including garages, shacks and informal camps. They have little protection against the cold.

Deborah Amos of National Public Radio, who has recently taken up US refugee resettlement as her new “beat,” spoke at the Newseum of the dilemmas facing reporters who are getting the refugee story out. It is hard to find new things to say about a story that seems much the same from day to day. The goal is to humanize the situation, not get caught up in statistics. “You want to tell small stories rather than big stories.” You can focus on the tragedy, or you can focus on resilience. You can focus on the welcome offered from various countries, but you also describe countries that move from feeling welcoming to feeling threatened.

Most refugees are skilled people, middle class people, who expect to find places where they can charge their cell phones and use ATM cards. Instead of malnutrition, the diseases seen among refugees coming into Europe are chronic diseases, such as heart conditions. Today’s refugees prefer not to stay in camps: conflicts today are lasting longer than they used to, so refugees know they are not well advised to assume that they will get home soon.

And yet refugees resist becoming assimilated in their place of arrival, surely a sign that they have not given up the possibility of getting home one day. A matter for huge concern is that half of global refugees are children and two thirds of those children are not being educated, a situation that bodes ill for the future, and yet  Syrian refugees in Turkey resist sending their children to Turkish schools. They want their children to be taught in Arabic, not in Turkish. Initially some Arabic language schools for Syrians in Turkey were financed by the Arabic speaking diaspora, but over time these groups have run out of money.  One theory about why there was a surge in refugees from Turkey into Europe in fall 2015 is that the closure of these schools caused Syrian families to decide that Europe was the only place they would be willing to have their children educated.

Calais Jungle

Switzerland, July 22, 2016

Yesterday, while attending a forum on European migration issues, I learned that in the town of Calais on France’s northwest coast, a growing shanty-town known as Calais Jungle populated by migrants and asylum seekers, now has a population of 7,300 and is likely to reach 10,000 by September. This deteriorating situation in Calais, not widely known in the U.S., cries out for attention, if only to allow those of us living at a distance to sense the shocking and heart-rending tensions and contradictions still surrounding Europe’s refugee/migrant crisis.

Calais, best known to the Anglophone world as the entry point into continental Europe via the Channel Tunnel, is a gathering place for refugees and migrants who have set their hopes on getting to the UK. Camps of this kind have been forming in Calais since the early 1990s. They have been set up on unoccupied land, using tents and other temporary shelter, moving to new locations when the French authorities close them. Last year this particular camp grew significantly. By April 2015, it had acquired, for the first time, showers, toilets and electricity. Charities have been providing one meal a day.

Because the UK is not party to the Schengen agreement for free movement of people in Europe, the UK is not legally required to allow entry to these people. Nor are they likely to get asylum in the UK as refugees, since they have already been living in France for some time, and therefore can no longer make a case that they are unsafe. But these people do not want to give up on the dream of getting to Britain, where many already have family members, and where they believe their chances of getting jobs are better than in France. The current population includes over six hundred children not accompanied by an adult, many of whom are waiting to be reunited with family members in the UK.

Frequently inhabitants attempt to board trucks or trains entering the Tunnel. One man recently walked almost the entire 31 miles of the tunnel, with freight trains rushing past him inches away, only to be arrested shortly before his arrival on the British side, and forced to return to France.  Just one month ago the port of Calais was forced to close for a time when migrants took to the streets, erecting barriers in the road in order to slow down vehicles heading for the tunnel so that they could board them. Police dispersed the migrants with tear gas.

The alternative to going to the UK for these people is to request asylum in France, but these migrants regard that step as giving up on better possibilities in the UK.

Left wing groups, including Jeremy Corbyn, embattled head of the British Labour Party, have been lobbying the British government to let in a good number of the migrants.  British who want to demonstrate their compassion for the Calais situation have mobilized an aid convoy for the refugees, but French authorities have blocked its departure from Dover, the port town on the British side of the Tunnel. This policy arises from French recognition that anything they do to improve the lot of the inhabitants of the camp is likely to encourage more people to come.

France seems unable to find a means effectively to disperse these people, even though conditions in the camp are unsanitary and crowded. In February of this year, a court in Lille allowed the Calais police to evict 1,000 migrants from the camp. But since the February evictions, the numbers have grown even greater. The authorities have brought 125 shipping containers into the shanty-town as a form of temporary housing for 1500 people. Permanent buildings are not possible because of the sandy soil.

The news site infowars.com reported in January 2016 that the French Army is making contingency plans for the “reappropriation of national territory,” in case these groups acquire weapons and become more hostile to authorities.

The situation presents the French authorities with a terrible dilemma.  Let’s fervently hope they can find a way out of this before the law of the jungle has its way.