Dancing with the Sniper: Rasha Abbas and the “Art of Survival” as an Aesthetic Strategy

Abstract

In the last few decades, a growing dissatisfaction with traditional approaches can be observed in migration and refugee studies. In particular, the widespread focus on the “refugee” and “migrant” as exclusive objects of study has been criticized for its underlying tendency of repeating the binary polarization between migrant and non-migrant, native and foreign as well as majority and minority. This chapter considers the short stories of Syrian journalist and writer Rasha Abbas against this background. Instead of reducing her stories to the depiction of flight and exile, this chapter explores her stories as aesthetic expressions of what can be called the “art of survival”—the concept focusing on strategies of empowerment and tactics to regain autonomy. In Abbas’ prose, this “art of survival” is achieved and expressed through the blending of times and spaces as well as the aesthetic transformation of reality into surreal realms. Experiences of war, displacement, exile, and patterns of exclusion in the new homeland merge into complex pictures of the human capacity to reframe and reinvent a given reality. When viewed from this perspective, the surreal and psychedelic nature of her writing intensifies the power of aesthetic freedom, thus helping overcome traditional representations of migrants and refugees in cultural expressions and literature.