“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.