Seeking Asylum: Literary Reflections on Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Human Rights

Abstract

Over the past decade, immigration law in the United States has taken several important steps toward establishing that human rights violations arising from sexual-orientation-based persecution are recognized grounds for granting asylum to refugees. Sexual orientation is joining other more established grounds for seeking protection from persecution. However, US asylum laws and practices still fail to protect all the refugees on US soil who face persecution if returned to their homelands. Asylum law, as written by Congress and interpreted by the courts and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), is forged through the conflict of two incompatible functions: it attempts to meet US obligations under international accords to shelter those persons whose own national governments cannot or will not protect them from persecution, and it attempts to limit the number of successful asylum claims in response to anti-immigrant feelings strongly felt and expressed by the American public. Asylum seekers, immigrant rights activists, and human rights advocates work to overcome the latter of these functions while strengthening the former. Scholarly human rights advocacy is typically carried out in the fields of law, public health, politics, and journalism. What is to be gained by expanding this range of fields to include literary criticism? In this essay I analyze an autobiography, Reinaldo Arenas' Before Night Falls, and two novels, Elias Miguel Mufioz' The Greatest Performance and Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy. These