“The expectation projected upon the refugee is that the past is less relevant than the future…”

Book Review

The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, Edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Abrams Press, 2018.

Viet Thanh Nguyen has become perhaps the most eloquent voice of the past decade of the immigrant experience in the United States.  Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Sympathizer (2016) stakes out a very particular angle on the Vietnam war and challenges all Americans who think they know the meaning of that war to think again. Philip Caputo’s 2015 New York Times' book review described the book as "giving voice to the previously voiceless [in other words the Vietnamese perspective] while it compels the rest of us to look at the events of 40 years ago in a new light." Nguyen is Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.  The Sympathizer was followed in 2016 by Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, an account of the way the Vietnam War has been remembered, and in 2021 by The Committed, a sequel to The Sympathizer.  

In The Displaced, published in 2018, Nguyen has gathered the essays of twenty-one refugee writers in the United States who capture the texture of the refugee experience.

The book is filled with heart-pulling refugee moments: The glowing flash when a twenty-year-old girl in a refugee camp receives a brand new turquoise dress with a lace collar, specially extracted for her by one kind woman from a pile of used clothing donated to the camp;  The heroic Hmong children who venture outside the Thai camp to collect greens for their younger siblings, paying the price of subsequent fury not because of the wrath of the enemy but because of their parents’ terror - they linger in the minds of the other children as “the real warriors;”  The Iranian refugee child whose teacher helps her make a papier maché topographical map of the United States - when the child explains that she has recently arrived and knows little about her new country the teacher responds “Oh, sweetie, you must be so grateful;” The Palestinian who underlines that his loss is not only the loss of home, but of his “entire country.”

The refugee as orphan, stripped of extended family, homeland, and agency; the refugee as actor, assimilating to be accepted, but knowing all the time assimilation is another word for performance; the refugee assuming a dual identity – one person at work, another at home; the refugee as ghost, invisible, particularly to those who do not accept her.

Even the most liberal amongst those living in host countries must be made thoughtful by the requirements and pressures that the refugee experience places upon newcomers.  The call from the so-called “host community” for gratitude, a condition of acceptance, scarcely camouflages the American need for smug self-satisfaction, our need to feel we are better than others.  The burdensome requirement to be exceptional to overcome the newcomer’s sense that those they meet see them as a statistic and nothing more. 

The refugee possesses a special relationship with the past, these writers tell us.  On the one hand, the past contains the loss, the wounds, the trauma of departure.  It represents an “incomplete narrative,” a ghostly sense that there is more to be known and understood in order to reach a sense of coherent identity.   And so the refugee sustains a “repetitive wounding,” says Chris Abani, born in Nigeria, now professor of English at Northwestern University.  But the expectation projected upon the refugee is that the past is less relevant than the future.  And so the refugee has a special relationship with time itself – you are always a refugee, while gradually no longer perceived as a refugee. Instead, he says, you are “a stutter in time-space, always repeating… unable to return and unable to truly settle or belong anywhere else.”

Refugees create an uncomfortable feeling for Americans, argues Abani, not so much because they are strangers per se, but because they awaken Americans’ fears that the stability of the state is an illusion, that any American could become a refugee themselves far more easily than they wish to believe.  Refugees arouse guilt at our misleading sense of well-being and suggest that our compassion is shallower than we would like to think.  They shake up our American consciousness as the nation of immigrants, reminding us that we are in fact a nation of refugees. Not only does each of us have a connection somewhere else, but our story contains more precariousness than many of us wish to admit.  We are thus a nation bent on hiding our fragility at all costs, first from ourselves and then from others.  We try to normalize our environment; we are disturbed by those who lift the curtain. 

A time comes when silence is betrayal

What a boon that we have Martin Luther King Day.

2017 was a depressing year for many Americans who care about our public life. And New Year’s Day 2018 did not bring with it even a grain of hope that the coming year will be better in that regard.

But a mere two weeks into 2018, we get to celebrate Martin Luther King, and for a few hours to enjoy a reset on hope and vision, on high ideals and moral clarity.

I joined a crowd of a couple of thousand in front of the Cambridge Town Hall yesterday afternoon, where the temperature was 18 degrees Fahrenheit and snowflakes bounced in the wind, to hear Senator Elizabeth Warren call President Trump out for his most recent expressions of racism, and call upon the assembled group to fight the way a previous generation did in the 1960s to ensure that racial and economic justice will roll down.  Then we were all put to work to do three hours of service to help the needy in Cambridge.

Earlier, at a Martin Luther King Day breakfast in Boston, assembled politicians were asked what was their favorite King quotation.  Warren and several others responded with the theme of King’s 1967 speech at Riverside Church in New York where he publicly announced his opposition to the Vietnam War.

“A time comes when silence is betrayal.”

This week we will pass the one year mark of President Trump’s dark and angry inaugural address and of the Women’s March, which brought a coalition of many, if by no means all, together to let off steam and express our rejection of Donald Trump’s agenda. Looking back at all that, I recall that those events were quickly followed by the furore over President Trump’s attempts to cancel visas to the US for the next 90 days, and we began to see judges and journalists seizing every chance they could to hold the new president’s feet to the fire. Their admirable work has continued.

But for many of us who do not have obvious means by which to fight for the values we see eroding in the present climate, the emerging situation this time last year had an effect that I didn’t initially expect.  We found we wanted to claim the space of our own lives and give none of it to our president. People who used to be news junkies stopped watching the TV news, refused to speak the name of the president, and sidelined those who handily gravitated to the next Trump joke. We chose to lie low.

Now that a year has passed, now that we have checked in with our brother Martin, who continues to admonish us across the decades that silence is betrayal, it seems as if it is right to lie low no longer.

It is time to recognize that Pope Francis’s words in his New Year’s Eve homily are right on target – that the ordinary things we do in life, and the way we go about doing them, DO make a difference because they contribute to the establishment and protection of norms.  And the past year has told us nothing if it hasn’t told us how quickly hard-won norms unravel.

So watch this space, not because it offers new or startling insights about current American politics, but because it is a place to honor the many who are out there setting norms for a better future.

Americans want to help refugees…

At a panel discussion on the global migration crisis held last week at Washington, DC’s Newseum, many of the questions from the audience requested practical guidance on how we Americans can help with resettlement. The panelists were less than totally able to answer these questions satisfactorily, a fact that captures at some level the vague cloud that surrounds the US refugee resettlement system. Indeed, an individual who has spearheaded refugee resettlement in New Haven, Connecticut, said in a forum several weeks earlier, run by the Episcopal Church, that when he launched his program, the US State Department advised him to operate “under the radar.” The authorities, it seems, fear that Americans who hear about refugees will be more inclined to push back against their arrival rather than roll up their sleeves to help.

A first step in changing this, according to the global charity Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), is to get the word out about the actual situation of refugees and displaced people worldwide. MSF devoted the past week to informing the people of Washington, DC about the realities of global migration. Timed tickets were available free of charge for a guided tour through an outdoor exhibit on the National Mall, close to the Washington Monument, where we were helped to understand through a number of hands-on re-enactments what it is like to be a refugee or displaced person.

My guide was a nurse from Connecticut in her sixties who has worked for MSF in South Sudan, Burundi and Tanzania and Afghanistan over the past fifteen years. She told us each to select items that we would take in an emergency evacuation. The options were pictured on laminated cards that we could carry with us on the tour. At each stage along our “journey” we were forced to choose one of the items we were carrying to give up for lack of space or sell in order to pay our way on the next stage of the journey. My five items were passport, family photos, medications, baby’s bottle, and water. The item I kept the longest was my passport. A number of my fellow travelers made the same choice. I have no idea whether this was a wise choice. My sense of randomness about it probably replicates the sense of randomness that overshadows most refugees as they try to make good choices hour by hour.

On our tour, we found ourselves in an inflated raft, squeezed closely so that twenty of us could just fit as we sat on the raised edges. Such a boat, we were told, would carry as many as sixty people from Libya or Turkey to Europe. Then we were shown a rudimentary refugee camp, including a latrine, the method by which people wash their hands after using the latrine in a place of water scarcity, and packets of dry peanut butter that can be easily distributed to nourish large numbers on the brink of starvation. In the next tent, a kind of clinic run by MSF, we saw how measles vaccines are kept cold without electricity and we viewed an efficient new malaria test instrument that can be administered to thousands in a single day. We learned the importance of cell phones – essential items for maintaining communication between scattered family members.

I learned that one of the main preoccupations of communities receiving refugees is how to ensure that refugee camps not become permanent dwelling places, in the way that the Palestinian camps have in Southern Lebanon and on the West Bank. Lebanon has not allowed official “camps” for Syrian refugees, so the 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon (now comprising one fifth of Lebanon’s population) are informally camped out in the Bekaa Valley, or renting patches of land closer to cities. The positive aspect of this approach is that the refugees become more integrated in the local economy, and Lebanese as well as refugees gain from the UN aid for the building of infrastructure. But 40 per cent of Syrian refugees in Lebanon live in temporary accommodation including garages, shacks and informal camps. They have little protection against the cold.

Deborah Amos of National Public Radio, who has recently taken up US refugee resettlement as her new “beat,” spoke at the Newseum of the dilemmas facing reporters who are getting the refugee story out. It is hard to find new things to say about a story that seems much the same from day to day. The goal is to humanize the situation, not get caught up in statistics. “You want to tell small stories rather than big stories.” You can focus on the tragedy, or you can focus on resilience. You can focus on the welcome offered from various countries, but you also describe countries that move from feeling welcoming to feeling threatened.

Most refugees are skilled people, middle class people, who expect to find places where they can charge their cell phones and use ATM cards. Instead of malnutrition, the diseases seen among refugees coming into Europe are chronic diseases, such as heart conditions. Today’s refugees prefer not to stay in camps: conflicts today are lasting longer than they used to, so refugees know they are not well advised to assume that they will get home soon.

And yet refugees resist becoming assimilated in their place of arrival, surely a sign that they have not given up the possibility of getting home one day. A matter for huge concern is that half of global refugees are children and two thirds of those children are not being educated, a situation that bodes ill for the future, and yet  Syrian refugees in Turkey resist sending their children to Turkish schools. They want their children to be taught in Arabic, not in Turkish. Initially some Arabic language schools for Syrians in Turkey were financed by the Arabic speaking diaspora, but over time these groups have run out of money.  One theory about why there was a surge in refugees from Turkey into Europe in fall 2015 is that the closure of these schools caused Syrian families to decide that Europe was the only place they would be willing to have their children educated.

A Dream Realized

The opening of Washington, D.C.’s new Museum of African American History and Culture on Saturday, September 24, occurring as it did in the same week as police shootings of black men in Tulsa and Charlotte, captured perfectly the mixture of grief and dignified struggle that has defined the African American story.

The juxtaposition was obvious to all.  We carried it inside us as we shared in the realization of a long-held dream to see the African American story honored in a central spot in our nation’s capital. President Obama underlined that the museum would not cure the racial ills of the United States. But, he said, the museum’s exhibits “can help us talk to each other, and more importantly listen to each other, and most importantly see each other.”

The new museum, with its distinctive architecture described by the New York Times as an “inverted ziggurat,” stands close to the familiar obelisk of the Washington Monument, within view of the site of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech and of the statue of Abraham Lincoln that provided King his setting,

The day of the museum inauguration was a day when we thought a lot about dreams. Many who spoke that day referenced the poem of Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Hughes spoke for African Americans in the twentieth century. In recent years a new swath of African American writers have eloquently confronted us with the continuing deferral of African Americans’ dignity in American society: Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow), Edward Baptist, (The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism), Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy), Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns). Black Lives Matter has gotten the word out about the kind of acts that have been rife ever since the ending of slavery but that have been treated with denial and callousness.

The opening of the museum was not so much an explosion as a jubilant acknowledgment that the African American story is and always was central to the American story. The ongoing struggles make that affirmation more meaningful, give it an edge, remind us that the battle for the world we aspire to is never won, is fought daily.

And somehow or other, I, and, I believe, many, many of us, felt drawn in last Saturday, knowing we were all part of this story. The story sends out a shaft of light that pierces our ongoing protections and defenses, that brings us alive, that teaches us what it means to love and engage.

Attending a concert of spirituals at Washington’s National Cathedral earlier in the week that was held in honor of the museum opening, I sat down beside a young black man and we introduced ourselves. “My name is Efram,” he said. “Pronounced like A-frame,” he added. I said my name was Margaret. The concert began, and I saw that Efram was looking up each of the songs on his i-phone so that he could follow the words. “Nobody knows the trouble I see,” “Take my hand, precious Lord,” “Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home” – songs of resistance, of acknowledgement of deep emotions trampled, of separation of mothers and children, of exodus, of pleas for deliverance. When the audience was welcomed to join in, Efram shared his i-phone with me. It turned out that he had been born in Ethiopia. None of these songs was familiar to him, but he wanted to know them.  Leaning in towards each other, we sang the three verses of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift every voice and sing, Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty,” reaching our heads higher for the crescendos as if we had been doing this together for all of time.