Ungrateful Girl Refugees in Lore Segal's Other People's Houses and Vesna Maric's Bluebird

Abstract

Abstract Against the background of recent extraordinary narratives of displaced girls, I consider two accounts of refugee girls in Britain at earlier historical moments: Lore Segal's Other People's Houses ([1964] 2018) about her memories of being a Kindertransportee in the late 1930s, and Vesna Maric's Bluebird (2009), a memoir of her journey into refugeehood as a teenage girl following the outbreak of the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s. I read their framing of the refugee experience as interventions into hegemonic scripts of displaced girlhood that ultimately destabilize the wider stories of nationhood that such narratives often uphold. Read through the frames of girlhood and refugeetude, these narratives point to alternative modes of imagining refugee girls and their position in and beyond the nation.