ANT005 - Immigration & displacement
This week, I look at stories of refugee crisis', the immigrant experience and the idea of belonging so often tied to these displacements of people.
Empathy has never been more important than now.
The things we once thought would bring humanity closer together are, in many ways, forcing us apart. The internet and social media are dens of false information and a haven for political meddling. Celebrity figures use their platforms to whip divisive groups into hateful frenzies. Governments seek to crack down on protest rights as people take to the streets over police racism and brutality or violence against women. Trolls drive both public figures and every-day kids to anxiety and depression. The gap between rich and poor is widened by recession and inflation as more and more turn to food banks. Culture wars rage around words like ‘woke’, ‘boomers’, ‘snowflakes’ and ‘nimbies’.
It’s important to remember that, when we zoom out, the world is getting better in many ways (as Stefan Sagmeister’s ongoing work illustrates), but it often doesn’t feel like it, and there is still much improvement to be made.
Amongst all of this, wars, political angst and climate crisis force millions from their homes and countries, thrown into the wider world to fend for themselves. They face unsafe boats on choppy seas, crowded refugee camps and systems not built to cope with them. Some help or welcome them with open arms, some seek to turn them away, others prey on their helplessness.
Empathy has never been more important than here.
How we treat these people, both as individuals and as groups - through face to face interactions, policy-making, media narratives and charity - is in part a result of how we think of them. How much we can understand their plight while retaining a sense that they are fundamentally no different from ourselves. Literature plays an important role in this. It encourages thoughtfulness and breaks down barriers. It puts us in the shoes of those we don’t understand.
There is an argument to be made that much of this is preaching to the choir, that anyone likely to pick up one of the books below already has a welcoming view towards asylum seekers, immigrants and refugees, but the truth is more nuanced. Even those with the best intentions can become disillusioned by the relentless news cycle full of incomprehensible figures that strip the individual stories away, that reduce people to numbers. Amongst the difficulty of being able to truly feel someone else’s struggle, it is all too easy for empathy to become its charitable but less human cousin - sympathy.
The books I will focus on today are the stories of these people, whether truth, fiction or somewhere in between. They bring us closer to what’s happening but, more importantly, to the people it’s happening to. They show the impact our collective and individual actions have and the grandfathers, mothers, brothers, sons and daughters they have that impact on.
“Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself”
Mohsin Hamid
Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise cuts straight to the shores of a small Greek island, where the bodies of a migrant boat have washed up. This tragedy has become commonplace and is treated systematically by generally well meaning officials, but the sole survivor - a nine year old boy called Amir - escapes. Helped by a local teenage girl, the story follows their plight and the bond they form, despite having no shared language, to show how the innocence an even humour of children can lead the way.
The refugees peer from their small, tattered tents to watch because this is what they have become: watchers, honed by captivity into seasoned observers of incremental change.
Omar El Akkad - What Strange Paradise
A Booker shortlisted novel by Mohsin Hamid, Exit West takes a more conceptual angle. In a world where portal doors have begun to appear, transporting anyone who steps through them to somewhere else, the concept of borders is being eroded. The doors to the most desirable locations become commercialised by gangs and once closed off destinations are suddenly flooded with people stepping hopefully through. A clever concept that forms a biting study of immigration, place and culture, given heart by the difficult love of its central couple as they flee war in their home country.
“...he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world, so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope....”
Mahsin Hamid - Exit West
Chimamanda Nhozi Adichie’s Americanah looks at a very different situation of immigration, following two young lovers who are separated when they leave military ruled Nigeria. One grapples with race and otherness amongst her largely successful life in America while the other loses his way to London’s underworld. When they meet again in a now democratic Nigeria, the experiences that have changed them are impossible to shake and we are given enlightening insight into the immigrant experience and the concept of belonging.
“Alexa and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him who were raised well, fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty.”
Chimamanda Nhozi Adichie - Americanah
Focused around the Vietnamese immigrant experience, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story collection The Refugees brings a similarly powerful insight to a range of characters as they navigate finding their feet in a new culture. Vivid tales of survival, strained relationships and the dreams of those seeking a new life, eight stories form a greater whole centered around identity, a concept fraught with complexity for so many.
“I came to understand that in the United States, land of the fabled American dream, it is un-American to be a refugee. The refugee embodies fear, failure, and flight. Americans of all kinds believe that it is impossible for an American to become a refugee, although it is possible for refugees to become Americans and in that way be elevated one step closer to heaven.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen - The Refugees
A novel of epic, heart-wrenching proportions, Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo brings humanity to the Syrian refugee crisis that, at the time of its 2019 release, had displaced millions with little sign off letting up. A classic journey tale of a couple fleeing their native Aleppo to seek passage to England, it hides layers of depth, research and deep understanding behind its deceptively simple story-teller style. Lefteri’s experiences as the child of Cypriot refugees play a part, but it was stints volunteering in Greece, learning Arabic to help engage with those in need, that have clearly given the book its heart.
“I think the second year was when it really started to shape the story because I was teaching women, I was holding their babies and you get that real connection. I started to see what strength and hope meant to them.
“I’d watch the children play and realise how their play changed as they became settled and felt more safe. Death was no longer imminent, and there wasn’t a fear anymore. I remember one person telling me that their child had been constantly asking ‘are we going to die in the war?’ That stayed with me.”
Chrisy Lefteri, in an interview with The Irish Times
It’s easy to think of refugees as people from hard lives seeking better ones, easy to forget that instead it is often normal lives full of love and joy that have been destroyed. That much is clear in Lefteri’s main characters - a beekeeper called Nuri and his wife Afra, an artist blinded by the explosion that killed their son. We join them in an English sea-side town where they are living in a hostel, seeking asylum, the story jumping back and forth to the journey they were forced to make as well as their pre-war life in Aleppo, a city that sings with the beauty it once had.
Name - My beautiful boy.
Cause of death - This broken world.
The Beekeeper of Aleppo’s power is that it genuinely thrives as a love story as much as a refugee story. A love that is marred by countless tragedies and heart-break but that retains a stubborn strength even in it’s lowest points. Much is made of Nuri’s need to remain strong, a guide and protector for his now blind wife, but it is Afra’s strength that truly keeps them afloat at times as PTSD tugs at both of their minds.
But when she was sad my world was dark. I didn’t have a choice about this. She was more powerful than I. She cried like a child, laughed like bells ringing, and her smile was the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. She could argue for hours without ever pausing. Afra loved, she hated, and she inhaled the world like it was a rose. All this was why I loved her more than life.
Lefteri’s skill, deftly applied, means that its tone avoids both the trap of over-sentimentality and that of hopelessness. Instead, it shows the humanity that shines through - from Nuri and Afra themselves as well as the people that help them along the way - but also the evil that lurks in places they must pass through and the impossible systems they must work around.
People are not like bees. We do not work together, we have no real sense of a greater good.
The Beekeeper of Aleppo is gripping throughout, but its power and weight should not be downplayed. It applies true humanity to a story too often lost in politics and numbers, showing the real lives that have been destroyed and the affects of how we choose to approach our treatment of the survivors. By so powerfully bringing to life one couple from the millions, the millions are made all the more real.
“What he is really saying is this: this is how the story must end; our hearts can bear no more loss”
Christy Lefteri - The Beekeeper of Aleppo
The most upsetting yet important piece of film I’ve seen, For Sama is the real footage of film-maker Waad al-Kateab as the conflict in Aleppo rises up around her and her unborn baby. Pick your time wisely and watch with caution, but do watch.
The sound of our songs was louder than the bombs falling outside.
As referenced in the intro, infamous graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister’s ongoing data visualisation work illustrates how, by many metrics such as poverty and equality, the world is getting better.
Most of us agree that life is better than death. Having food beats being hungry. Knowledge is better than ignorance. We’d rather live in a democracy than a dictatorship. We prefer health over sickness and peace over war. And all of these things can be measured. And all of these things have been measured… And all of them have improved.
Novelist Elif Shafak on living and writing as an immigrant, in her third language.
Like every immigrant, I am very aware of the gap between the mind and the tongue—my mind runs faster, restless like rivers, and my poor tongue tries to catch up—to no avail.
UK rapper Roots Manuva’s first album Brand New Second Hand sprung to mind as I pieced together this issue. The child of Jamaican immigrants, raised in Stockwell, his music is full of both the tension and melding of these varying cultural influences. The track Inna, in particular, is a much under-rated tale of otherness amongst the rapid gentrification of his surroundings.
I hope you’re continuing to enjoy A Novel Tribe. If you are, the best thing you could do to help right now is to share it with someone you know. Simply forward this email or link them to the website.
Until next time,
MQ.