Refugee Literature Research Articles

AT THE BORDER OF TWO WORLDS Role options of the “distantiated spectator” in Vadoma by Anna Vörös

The debut volume of Anna Vörös is a unique and solitary voice in contemporary Hungarian literature referring to the representation of refugees. The author is actively practicing psychology and worked as a volunteer in hot zones of the migrant crisis, so she had the chance to learn about different aspects of the crisis from the inside. By collecting experiences, she built out a literary universe with an authentic voice. Her narrative can be defined as close to the triple structure of distant suffering theory by Luc Boltanski. The model of Boltanski features three categories of which the third is the “distantiated spectator”: who instead of playing the role of furious and delivering justice, rather interprets and experiences mediatized suffering in its historical context and process. The cycle of prose featuring the Syrian heroine in its metaphors and symbols avoids the traps of topoi and common places of storytelling based on “contentless pathos” and “colonizing, colonial and postcolonial point of view”. Anna Vörös in a revealing and documentarist tone approaches the arrival experience of masses coming to Europe – this experience may be described by sociological, cultural anthropological, and spatial theories while using various topics and situations. In her model motifs like the moment of spotting the sea or land, crossing them, and winning the battle over physical barriers, are melted into contemporary European refugee literature as well as tendencies in film, fine art, as well as media representations of the topic. The paper is an attempt to discover this question in its complexity.

Motherlands in Europe. Economic Subalternity and Fantasies of Family in Contemporary Romanian Literature of Migration

ABSTRACT This paper sets out to analyze fictional and autobiographical Romanian narratives, published between 2010 and 2014, that engage with westward economic migration within Europe, focusing on the context of EU-15. My main argument is that these narratives, which convey an experience of economic subalternity, cast light on the problematic nature of the EU as a neocolonial enterprise, even though they fail to articulate a full-blown progressive politics of mobility. I further examine how their particular narrative features – defined by monoglossia, sentimentalism, and enclosure – suggest the failure of the constructivist idea of Europeanness that hailed the advent of post-nationality and the promise of mobility as social progress. The texts I analyze uncover and respond to this failure by forging conservative worldviews that are primarily invested in romanticizing family bonds and affective communities. Based on these findings, I open a theoretical debate and try to explain that fiction of contemporary economic migration partakes, alongside the emergent corpus of refugee literature, in a world-literary shift, from the polyphonic, cosmopolitan paradigm of postcolonial fiction, to less sophisticated narrative forms that reassert the value of authenticity and national homogeneity and retaliate against multiculturalism and hybridity.

Between Two Worlds

Abstract Anna Vörös’s collection of short stories, Vadoma (2022), offers a completely novel perspective on refugees in contemporary Hungarian literature. The collection focuses on Vadoma, a young refugee girl of Syrian origin, who is the first-person narrator of most of the short stories. The reader can follow the young girl’s path from Aleppo to Budapest as she faces dilemmas and problems. The main issue of our hero is the fact that she is stuck between two worlds, as her old life and city of origin do not exist anymore, but Budapest has yet to become her home. Her mother tongue and words are no longer enough to express her experiences, but she has not learnt a new language yet. Mariangelo Pallodino’s concept of “islandment”, which refers to landing without arrival, expresses Vadoma’s situation perfectly. The present study examines whether Anna Vörös’s short stories can be read in the context of refugee literature, and it looks at how the figure of the refugee appears in them. Special attention is paid to the themes of cultures, religions, languages, and the in-betweenness of identities.

Coparenting, mental health, and the pursuit of dignity: A systems-level analysis of refugee father-mother narratives

Research on coparenting is virtually absent from the refugee literature, despite its importance for family systems, children's bio-behavioural and emotional development, and intergenerational responses to social change. In 2022, we conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with Syrian refugees in Jordan and used thematic analysis to examine how fathers and mothers (n = 15 dyads) enacted parenting together. We identified four approaches characterising how couples navigated coparenting interactions, family cohesion, and intergenerational change. These were negotiation, mirroring, anchoring, and transformation. Specifically, Syrian couples negotiated how to balance responsibilities, sought emotions and behaviours that reflected calm and respect, prioritised family togetherness over education or resettlement opportunities, and, strikingly, adopted gentler parenting approaches to transform intergenerational experiences. Underpinning these four themes were efforts to uphold family dignity. Syrians described themselves as ordinary parents, eschewing the label of refugee parents and building a normal life for their families after war and displacement. Our thematic analysis offers methodological and conceptual advances in exemplifying how to capture a dyadic understanding of coparenting and why refugees strive to parent in ways that sustain mental health and dignity. This systems-level analysis of coparenting in dignity is specifically relevant to strengthening the processes of family-level communication and to designing integrated programs that support caregiving, wellness, and family unity. Our findings lay the groundwork for developing a relational, agentic model of family caregiving systems in the context of precarity and forced displacement.

Behrouz Boochani on Manus Island: Contesting Refugee Experience in the Global South

ABSTRACT This article makes a case for reframing refugee literature through reading Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, translated from Farsi by Omid Tofighian. Written in detention on Manus Island via text messages on WhatsApp, Boochani’s book has won wide acclaim in Australia and internationally, not only among literary critics, but as a work of popular appeal in writers’ festivals and cultural prizes. The popular narrative around No Friend but the Mountains has introduced it, on the one hand, as a representative specimen of refugee literature, and more specifically as an example of life writing of a stateless Kurd. We argue that Boochani’s work resists reductive characterisations of refugee literature both through its literary investments and its multiple affiliations with political and discursive interests. By attending closely to stylistic properties and its discursive contexts, we emphasise that No Friend but the Mountains is not just a protest against Boochani’s own treatment by the Australian government but a tracing of how the lived experience and literary subjectivity of refugees in the Global South contests facile categorisation and unitary nationalism.

Training Considerations for Providers Engaged in Refugee Mental Health Care

Abstract. More people than ever in history are being displaced and becoming refugees due to political conflict, climate change, and persecution, among others. Meeting the mental health care needs of refugees has become a global priority. This population’s needs are unique due to the multiple traumatic experiences of refugees, their difficulties in navigating various systemic barriers, and the minimal specialized cultural training in refugee care. In order to improve the health of refugees, it is important to examine how care is delivered and the provider and systemic factors that perpetuate inequities and cultural misunderstandings in providing care. Most of the refugee literature focuses on refugee factors that limit access to care but falls short on discussing providers’ lack of training in refugee care. In the following paper, we present refugee mental health training considerations for providers. These considerations are based on the lessons learned from direct clinical work in a refugee clinic located in a major public academic hospital in the New England area (United States of America). The authors discuss the particular context of caring for refugee populations, the skills needed to work with this population, and considerations for navigating provider and systemic barriers that arise in refugee care. We believe that training mental health providers can have significant implications for refugee mental health care utilization, patient improved treatment outcomes, and on refugees’ increased sense of self-determination.

Portrayal of Loss of Culture and Identity in Refugee Literature: An Analysis of Alan Gratz’s Refugee

This paper intends to discuss a novel from the corpus of refugee literature for its representation of the refugees’ loss of culture and national identity. The chosen novel is Refugee (2017) by Alan Gratz. Refugee literature is a recent addition to the various genres of English literature which delves into the refugee experience. The refugees suffer from identity crisis and loss of culture as they hang between the country that they leave behind and another country where they hope to get a safe shelter from poverty or manslaughter or other problems that they have evaded from. So, this paper shall discuss how Alan Gratz has brought out the identity and cultural loss in the novel’s characters and how he has represented their insecurities and fears. In this paper, the relevance of this novel (as compared to media) in erasing people’s oblivion about the grave issue of the refugee crisis, shall also be discussed. The first section in the paper is an introduction which discusses the topic and differentiates refugee experience from the case of immigrants, a subsection of the introduction defines refugee literature and studies its relevance, second section includes literature review and background to the novel Refugee and the third section contains the analysis of the novel, followed by a conclusion. The paper studies the genre of refugee literature which is generally left out and the issue of identity crisis is something very huge which needs to be brought out and pondered upon.

Writing in and Out of Exile: A Foucauldean Reading of No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani

“Refugee” is a historically constructed term that privileged concerns that are substantially ideological and political rather than economic and ecological. But one cannot neglect the fact that environmental and economic concerns cannot be set apart from the political and hence rises the necessity to create a new inclusive category of “ essential needs” to consider their intrinsic interconnectivity as its one of the apriorism. Refugee literature essentially addresses not only the displacement but the gaps that are found in the sociological approach to “statelessness” and migration. On the other hand, literature stands for individual expressions and experience. Literature in the context of statelessness not only signifies the notion of being a “refugee” but being an “ asylum, seeker” as well. No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani is such an autobigraphcial novel written in the backdrop of his experience as an asylum seeker and consequent incarceration in the Australian detention regime. The Australian detention centre is built and worked in such a way that it satisfies the idea of the panopticon. The Kyriarchal system works in the prison even in a way that affects the psyche of the imprisoned individuals and thus these stateless asylum seekers undergo extreme existential dilemmas and commit severe crimes, turning against one another and sometimes even suicides. On the basis of the experiences of Boochani, the carceral system of Australian detention centre is expounded here through a Foucaludean idea of punishment, Bentham’s notion of the panopticon as well Fiorenza’s idea of kyriarchy where all of them are essentially different shades and shapes of exerting power.

Persistent psychological distress in resettled refugee women-at-risk at one-year follow-up: Contributions of trauma, post-migration problems, loss, and trust.

The mental health of women has been largely neglected in the refugee literature, notwithstanding the specific gender-related issues that confront women seeking asylum. Furthermore, a specific category of women, deemed to be women-at-risk, face particular challenges in their journey and resettlement process. This longitudinal study investigated psychological distress in refugee women-at-risk one year after resettlement in Australia. Follow-up survey of 83 women-at-risk (mean age = 33.41 years; SD = 11.93) assessed: trauma events and symptoms; loss events and loss distress; level of post-migration problems; anxiety, depression, and somatic symptoms; and absence of trust in community members. Participants demonstrated no symptom change since initial assessment (p > .05). Substantial proportions of women reported traumatization (39%), PTSD (20%), anxiety (32%), and depression (39%) above clinical cut-offs, and high levels of somatization and loss distress. Post-migration problems, trauma events, and region of birth were associated with all symptoms, with post-migration problems the strongest predictor. Absence of trust in community members was associated with trauma, depression, and somatic symptoms. Initial trauma and somatic symptoms were associated with follow-up traumatic and somatic symptoms. Loss and trauma events were associated with loss distress. Findings underline the role of post-migration problems on psychological distress and the need to consider women's psychological wellbeing in the context of their trauma and loss history, potential impacts of ethnicity, and complex socio-cultural dynamics underpinning issues of trust within communities. Effective service delivery requires that practitioners screen for and address psychological distress in women-at-risk at least up to 18 months after resettlement.

Exploring Visual Narratives of the Refugee Experience With Students

AbstractThe author draws on previous work in looking at refugee literature and focuses on two different, yet arguably complimentary, examples of marginalized narratives in graphic novels that inservice teachers can use in instruction. The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks offers a fictional story yet delves into complex issues and themes. Illegal by Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin, and illustrated by Giovanni Rigano, takes a more realistic approach to the topic. Both graphic novels are effective and can lead to classroom applications. The author offers a description of the works and discussion about instructional steps for their use with students.

Introduction: Refugee Literatures

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...

Refugee Experience in Alan Gratz’s Refugee and Gillian Cross’ After Tomorrow Margarete Rubik Summary As a response to recent

As a response to recent mass migratory movements, numerous children’s novels about refugees have been published in the last decades. The paper analyses two of these novels, Alan Gratz’s Refugee (2017) and Gillian Cross’s After Tomorrow (2013), and puts them into the context of the ‘transcultural turn’ in cultural studies. The paper also presents the results of a survey among university lecturers of various countries about the benefits, challenges and teaching aims of including migrant and refugee literature into the courses they teach.

In the Wake of Trauma

In the Wake of Trauma Ashley Hope Pérez (bio) The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir Thi Bui Harry N. Abrams https://www.abramsbooks.com 336 pages; Print $26.99 The Best We Could Do draws readers into the often unspoken pain of growing up in the wake of the traumas that Thi Bui and her family endured during and after the Vietnam War. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography and already translated into Spanish and Italian, Bui’s haunting memoir contributes a visually complex graphic narrative to the emerging genre of refugee literature. Click for larger view View full resolution In 1978, after fleeing from Vietnam to Malaysia, the Bui family was relocated to Chicago in a matter of months thanks to the help of a sponsoring family. This historical depiction of a refugee experience stands in stark contrast to the reality of the world’s more than 22 million refugees seeking asylum today, the vast majority of whom will not achieve resettlement in their lifetimes. In the face of this staggering reality, the events depicted in The Best We Can Do seem to offer the consolation of particularity: in it, we track how one family persists, contorts, and reconstitutes itself despite experiences of abandonment, hunger, displacement, and crippling uncertainty. But Bui complicates this consolation by confronting readers with the human cost of war and the long shadow that it casts in the lives of the “lucky” ones who, like her family, escaped Vietnam and avoided decades of languishing in refugee camps and other spaces of detainment. The memoir begins with a full-page image of a pregnant belly seen from above. Meeting our narrator in childbirth is apt, given that becoming a mother is what triggers Bui’s quest to understand her parents—or at least to encounter them in their complexity and in the context of their histories rather than as “two sides of a chasm, full of meaning and resentment.” From here, the narrative is organized around Bui’s longing for “an origin story that will set everything right,” and we track her efforts to amass historical knowledge and extensive family testimony. But as Bui struggles to achieve reconciliation with the pain that has been suffered and transmitted, that reconciliation comes from loosening her hold on the particulars of the past and instead unspooling their emotional content. In contrast to the understated text, the panels of the memoir ache with such verbs as withholding, denying, stifling, longing, drifting, dreading, hoping, with nouns like birth, water, blood, milk, fear, and hunger. Bui excels at depicting suppressed physical pain and afflictive emotion in the human figures she draws. If we return to the opening scene of Bui’s own labor, we encounter the description of pain that “comes in twenty-foot waves,” but the visual narrative makes clear that the most potent source of hurt for Bui is her mother’s sudden departure from the hospital room. Bui depicts her mother in the hallway just outside, her eyes cast down, eyebrows gathered, one hand pressed across her mouth and the other braced across her stomach as if contracting around the remembered pain of her six childbirths and the periods of grave unrest and danger that accompanied them. Like many gestures of suffering in the narrative, we will see this posture repeated in other bodies, as in an image of Bui as a small girl terrified by her father’s menacing presence. Postural echoes like these abound in the memoir, subtly signaling the embodied character of intergenerational trauma. The opening labor scene also initiates a painstaking process by which Bui will chronicle all six of her mother’s experiences in childbirth at various points in the narrative, including those siblings who did not survive. To remember and record these births in a ritual act by giving each scene of pain and possibility its due offers one metaphor for the work as a whole. Bui’s own birth comes just three months before the surrender of South Vietnam, which means that she has no memories of this period in her family’s suffering. In the...

Forcing displacement: The postcolonial interventions of refugee literature and arts

ABSTRACTIn Postcolonial Asylum, David Farrier explains why refugee experiences have been considered as a “scandal” for postcolonial studies, but also how they have become central to the field, insofar as they reflect the violence and unevenness of the current world order. If geography, political philosophy and law have analysed current “refugee crises”, the literature and arts produced by or about forcefully displaced people have remained understudied. This article affirms that postcolonial theory, precisely because of its situation at the crossroads between social sciences and humanities, offers a unique platform from where to study refugee literature and arts. It also argues that its enduring impact lies in its extraterritoriality, i.e. its capacity to interrogate dominant literary histories defined along national borders, frustrate unilingual visions of national languages and individual conceptions of authorship, and inspire seminal “turbulence” in artistic, critical, and academic practices.

“Refugee Literature”: What postcolonial theory has to say

In early July 2017, the biannual international symposium of the Scientific Interests Forum – Middle East and Muslim Worlds (Groupement d’Interets Scientifiques – Moyen Orient Mondes Musulmans; GIS ...

A life without a shoreline: Tropes of refugee literature in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone

ABSTRACT Through close engagement with Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Go, Went, Gone (first published in German as Gehen, ging, gegangen in 2015), this article makes a case for refugee literature as a body of texts by and about refugees which represent migration as part of a shared world. Ostensibly a novel about hospitality, Go, Went, Gone establishes walls, paper(s) and water as tropes of refugee literature, turning them into meditations on habits of thought built into our understanding of language, on the precariousness of foundational narratives, and on what ultimately constitutes a human life. Refraining from offering a solution to the refugee crisis in spite of dramatizing the lessons of ethical hospitality, the novel compels its readers to dwell on the discomfort of a global crisis that requires a political solution which transcends the fatalism of the west’s cultural self-doubt.

Uncertainty in situations of forced displacement:Acritical interpretative synthesis of refugee literature

AbstractReferences to uncertainty are omnipresent in literature on forced displacement. This article presents a critical interpretative synthesis of literature about uncertainty in refugee situations and explores common assumptions that underlie the narrative of uncertainty. The analysis of the literature shows that uncertainty appears to be inherent to refugee situations. Also, uncertainty is mainly seen as a constraining and abnormal experience. We critically question these assumptions and try to illustrate how they tend to obscure both the processes that render refugee situations uncertain and the varied ways in which uncertainty can be understood and is made sense of by refugees themselves. Finally, we suggest potential areas and directions for future research on uncertainty in refugee situations.

Crossing borders: family migration strategies and routes from Burma to the US

ABSTRACTOver the last 35 years, the US has been the top recipient country for refugee resettlement. Despite political ambivalence about refugee admittance and their integration into America’s sociocultural fabric, little is known in refugee literature about how receiving countries’ refugee and asylum policies structure refugee migratory processes and flows from countries of origin. Based on 21 in-depth interviews and group discussions with Chin-Burmese families, this paper traces migratory strategies and routes from Northern Burma to the US by examining the role of class, family dynamics, cross-border connections and social capital in migratory decision-making for irregular border-crossings and endurance as transit migrants. Additionally, I analyse the critical functions of intermediary social actors and institutions, particularly faith and community-based organisations, for gaining entry to destination countries. I show that examining Chin refugees’ agency and pre-migratory motives demonstrates the heterogeneity of the refugee population, justifying Chimamanda Adichie’s claim that ‘nobody is just a refugee’.

Literature Focus Units as a Means of Exploring the Refugee Experience

<p>Changes in the nation’s demographics, a current focus on immigration, and the world’s refugee crisis require educators to explore positive ways to assist students and families in transition. This article suggests using refugee literature to help ease children into the new school environment. Books associated with the refugee theme are organized using the literature focus unit framework. Four specific children’s literature titles are highlighted within the piece; however, the suggested books and activities are provided as a model to assist teachers in gaining new insight into how they can use cross-cultural communication to explore the refugee experience. We propose that through this exemplar unit, teachers can learn about authentic instructional approaches that may help them meet the multicultural needs of a variety of diverse student groups.</p>

Strategies for Adopting Children's Refugee Literature in the Multicultural Classroom

Although many studies currently detail refugee experiences about famine, war, and frightening events like the holocaust, little research about the portrayal of the refugee experience in children’s literature exists ( Hope, 2008 ). This lack of research or gap creates a problem of understanding for educators and students in the multicultural classroom. These refugee children have had little or no formal education and this has created a major learning block for them in American classrooms. This study seeks to answer the question: what are examples of refugee children’s literature and effective strategies to help children better understand and appreciate one another and their cultures? A book review of selected refugee children’s literature and an analysis of pedagogy of effective instructional strategies were the methodologies used in the study. Study findings indicate four refugee children’s books represent similarities and the uniqueness of the literature and identify effective instructional strategies and activities to enhance greater understanding of the refugee experience. Policy implications from the study suggest strategies that educators may employ to adopt children’s refugee literature in the multicultural classroom. The path to embrace, to enhance, and to celebrate the life experiences of refugee children may be accomplished through the implementation of these effective instructional strategies in the multicultural classroom to help children better understand and appreciate one another and their cultures.