‘The new Europeans’: the image of the African refugee in European literature

Abstract

This essay examines the representation of African refugees and asylum seekers in European literature in general, as well recent life writings and literature for young adults in particular. Examples will be drawn from writers as diverse as Benjamin Zephaniah and Senait G. Mehari. It is argued that the selected refugee stories invest in narrating an imagined community of ‘the new Europeans’ and thus invite readers to a plural reading of history. Following this train of thought, I am particularly interested in the interplay between images and motifs that evoke and shape various nation-states while illuminating an imagined European community. I therefore seek to excavate a transcultural imagery that characterizes refugee and asylum seekers as the ‘new Europeans’ by utilizing narrative strategies which reflect Paul Ricoeur's ideas about a new ethos for Europe.

Keywords:

• the new Europeans
• P. Ricoeur
• life writing
• children's literature

Notes

1. By bringing Europe's ‘others’ into alignment with Europe's political and institutional uncertainty, Benhabib's analysis of Europe's transformation echoes dimensions of Ulrich Beck's World risk society where a self-critical, highly political society faces new dimensions of exigence for ‘responsible globalization’, ‘transnational institutionalisation and democratisation’. Beck is certainly right that ‘such developments call for a new transnational dialogue of politics and democracy. Beck (2000), p. 8.

2. The concept of the Homo Europaeus as a subcategory of the Homo Sapiens was introduced by the biologist Carl Linne′ in the eighteenth century. For a detailed discussion on the socio-cultural construction of the Homo Europeaus see, Wolfgang Schmale's illuminating article, ‘Die Konstruktion des Homo Europaeus’, 2001, 165–184 and Veronika Lipphardt and Kiran Klaus Patel's essay, ‘Auf der Suche nach dem Europäer. Wissenschaftliche Konstruktionen des Homo Europaeus’, 2007.

3. See Nietzsche and Musil's constructions of a ‘European human being’ in Paul Michael Lützler (1992), pp. 190–272

4. Klaus J. Bade (2003) describes the legal immigration into Europe between the 1950s and the 1990s as follows: ‘Europe west of the Iron Curtain had generally transformed itself by the late 1980s into a continent of immigration; immigration had become a central political issue in all European countries affected by it. From 1950 to 1990, the total resident foreign population in the present EU countries and Switzerland and Lichtenstein grew more than fourfold, from 3.8 million (1.7 percent of the total population) in 1950 to 10.9 million (3.3 percent) in the 1970 and 16 million (4.5 percent) in 1990. The highest absolute figures in 1995 were in Germany with 7.7 million (8.8 percent), France with 3.6 million (6.3 percent) and Britain with 2 million (3.4 percent).’

5. By and large, an exponential growth of stories about refugees can be witnessed. In addition to Senait G. Mehari's story, a great number of refugee life writings has been published, to name but a few, Mende Nazer's Slave: true story of a girl's lost childhood and her fight for survival (London: Virago, 2004), Nura Abdi's Tränen im Sand [Tears in the sand] (Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe, 2003), Henriette Akofa's Keine Zeit für Tränen [No time for tears] (München: Ullstein, 2002), Francis Bok's Escape from slavery (New York: St Martin's Griffin, 2003) and Waris Dirie's Desert flower (New York: Virago, 1998). Furthermore, the production of refugee stories in children's literature is also quite astonishing; see for ,example Beverley Naidoo's The other side of truth (London: Penguin, 2000) and her Web of lies (London: Penguin, 2004). The story of an Iraqi refugee girl is told in Elizabeth Laird's Kiss the dust (London: Penguin, 1991) and the life of a child soldier is narrated in Bernard Ashley's Little soldier (London: Orchard Books, 1999). Rachel Anderson's Warlands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) gives insights into the life of Vietnamese refugees and Gaye Hicyilmaz's Smiling for strangers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) focuses on refugees in the war in the former Yugoslavia.

6. Zephaniah became famous for his poetry and is often seen as ‘a major player on the British literary and cultural scene/. Born in Birmingham in the late 1950s, as son of a Barbadian father and a Jamaican mother, he experienced from early on what it means to lead a life between different cultures (Doumerc 2005, p. 193).

7. Mehari's book Heart of fire: one girl's extraordinary journey from child soldier to soul singer was first published in Germany in 2004 under the title Feuerherz by Droemer Verlag Munich.

8. In this article, the term ‘minority literatures’ is used rather broadly, including, in addition to literature by ethnic minorities, immigrant writing, women's literature, slave narratives, and refugee life narrative.

9. Due to the increasing popularity of such life writings, critics within the field of minority literatures have made attempts at classifying different sub-genres of autobiographical writing, such as Gillian Whitlock's approach to postcolonial life narratives (2000), Susanna Egan's take on genres of crises (1999), and Miriam Fuchs's study (2004) on life narratives and catastrophes.

10. Without doubt, events such as the creation of dictatorships, the decline of empires, and the outbreak of wars and catastrophes and the consequent waves of mass migration are not at all new to the human species. In fact, our world history is full of records telling stories of hope and despair. New, however, is the scale with which waves of migration hit Europe, and of course, other places, and even more surprising is how quickly breaking news arrives in our globally connected living rooms.

This development is particularly interesting in the context of children's literature, since a critical negotiation of nationality and ethnicity is still very recent. The condition of migrancy inevitably ‘have formed the subject matter of children's fiction’, as Pat Pinsent states, and he suggests that ‘some of this interest being triggered by the need for newer communities to find their voices, while the acceptability of such narratives for publication for children has been increased’. See Pinsent (2005), pp. 173–190, 181.

11. Due to the great discrepancy between the original German version and its English translation I chose to work with my own close translation of the passage: ‘Wenn sie [ehemalige eritreische Soldaten] mal hierherkommen oder in Europa leben, vergeht ihnen der Stolz. Keine europäische Eritreerin’ ist stolz darauf, Soldatin gewesen zu sein. Erst hier wurde allen, die in Afrika als Kinder kämpften, bewusst, wie schrecklich das alles war.’ (Mehari 2004, p. 299)

12. See also the introduction to Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, Bekers, Helff and Merolla, eds, 2008, forthcoming where we also highlight the importance of the reversed label in the context of Euro-African literatures.

13. While in his famous Mythologies (1970) Roland Barthes once declared the Tour de France to a French myth, we might be inclined to see the Eurovision Song Contest as an example of European mythmaking.

14. Here again, some meaning is lost in translation, while the German original poignantly criticises this reduction (see p. 285), the English translation is less direct in its criticism.