Introduction: Refugee Literatures

Abstract

Introduction:Refugee Literatures Hadji Bakara (bio) "I am tired of humanizing myself" Baha' Ebdeir, "The Key to Return" (Making Mirrors 12). Modern refugee literature is about a century old. It emerged in the early twentieth century as the product of and response to a new kind of European nation state, what Karl Polanyi called the "crustacean type of nation" with a "hard shell" and a form of "sovereignty more jealous and absolute than anything known before" (202). Refugees, as the anthropologist Liisa Malkki has noted, exist only because of the specific ways of belonging and not belonging induced by modern nationhood. And this historical co-emergence of the nation and the refugee tells us at least one very important thing: refugee writers have always been special witnesses to the shifting grounds of political life. These acts of witnessing have been present from the very beginning of modern refugee writing. In B. Traven's novel The Death Ship (1922), for instance, the stateless protagonist, turned away at every European border, comes to understand that "the passport . . . and not the sun, is the center of the universe" (42). For Traven, who lived stateless for nearly two decades, the introduction of the passport—a "most egregious little modernism," in Paul Fussell's words—was tantamount to a new political order of things, about which refugees became reluctant but vocal experts (26). A decade later, Bertolt Brecht, another stateless German, began to sketch a universal script in the margins of his notebooks that would become the fictional dialogues, Refugee Conversations. Rather than learn to speak or perform the [End Page 289] language of an asylum granting nation, Brecht imagined refugees inventing a new language altogether, a language that would open up new ways of being in the world. Brecht's universal script speaks to the active political vision and sense of authority held by many refugee writers, and explored in the essays that follow. Importantly, this vision cuts against an inherited idea of refugees as passive supplicants seeking mere recognition as human beings. In the early twentieth century, writing by and about refugees was a largely European phenomenon. Yet this literature often went unrecognized because it was hidden away in national literary traditions. Only with the publication of Lyndsey Stonebridge's Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018), for instance, has it become possible to see Simone Weil, W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, and George Orwell as part of a generation of writers responding to the conditions of modern refugees. After World War II, the visibility of refugee writing was impaired by the expansion of national sovereignty across the globe. Where new refugee literatures did develop, in Palestine and the Indian subcontinent, for example, they tended to lose their specificity as such by being folded into the emergent category of postcolonial literatures (Gikandi 2010). Meanwhile, post-colonial refugee writing that did gain traction often appealed to humanitarian sympathy rather than a more difficult form of political solidarity. This doesn't mean that stridently political refugee literature did not exist in the decades following World War II. The work of Mahmoud Darwish, for instance, is one exemplary case. Yet, as Eleni Coundouriotis rightly notes, the most visible narratives of the "refugee experience" tended to be unidirectional "stories of flight" from a single catastrophic event in the past towards safety and security in West (78). Beginning in the 1960s, versions of the Third World 'humanitarian narrative' came to dominate how refugee literature was written and read, at least in the West. Refugees, as Mimi Thi Nguyen has shown, were cast as the needy recipients of the "gift of freedom," bestowed upon peoples of the Global South by the imperial powers of the West, now washed in the benevolence of humanitarian compassion (4). Yet over the last decade, a more fulsomely political and critical refugee literature has been in resurgence (Espiritu 412–415). It's to this resurgence that this special issue responds and contributes. In an epoch marked by perpetual war and rising inequality across the globe, and the intensification [End Page 290] of Europe's decades long 'refugee crisis,' the ideas and affects found in writing by and about refugees have become sources of intellectual...