“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’Intérêts Scientifiques – Moyen Orient Mondes Musulmans; GIS – MOMM) in Paris featured the full-day panel I organized on “Refugee Literature”.¹ The corpus is vast and predates the current refugee crisis. Yet, given the remit of the symposium (to cover the Middle Eastern and Islamic worlds) and the context in which it was taking place, namely the Syrian and Mediterranean refugee “crisis”, it was appropriate that the literature and arts of the last 15 years by Middle Eastern and African writers, film-makers and artists should take the limelight. One of the ambitions for this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, which emerged out of this occasion, is to reiterate the specific contribution of postcolonial theory to the study of refugee literature and arts.² A second specificity is the focus on Arabic and/or Muslim literatures. It therefore considers a corpus which has still largely been left out of postcolonial discussions despite the colonial and orientalist regimes of intervention and domination that the US and Europe impose on these parts of the globe.

In such extreme circumstances, experienced by those fleeing the civil war in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, as well as others from the Global South, from places like Eritrea and Libya, and encountering the dehumanizing conditions of Fortress Europe, what literature and art might do, and how or on what ethical grounds they do it, are questions that are often rehearsed. For instance, in her contribution entitled “The Battle of Truth and Fiction: Documentary Storytelling and Middle Eastern Refugee Discourse”, Valerie Anishchenkova provides a video-textual analysis of James Longley’s (2006) award-winning documentary Iraq in Fragments and the short, digitally filmed documentary Refuge: Human Stories from the Refugee Crisis (Firpo 2016) by a team of film-makers gathered in the Refuge Project collective. In comparing the two, she explores the problematic aspects of representational discourse – what Hannah Arendt (1963) conceptualized as the “politics of pity” and Luc Boltanski (2004) investigated as “distant suffering” – with reference to documentaries that cover refugee migrations from the Middle East. In undertaking a critical interrogation of refugee discourse in media and filmic production, she examines documentary as an essentially fictionalized cinematic narrative that manipulates audience expectations of authenticity and “truth”.

This special issue therefore turns towards the modes of representation of the refugee condition and also studies the function(s) and impact of such representations on literary and artistic discourses. Is the function of refugee poetics to raise awareness about the conditions of life for those displaced? Can literature prevent future wars from happening? And when wars, ecological catastrophes, and economic pressure force people to leave their home places, shall we conclude that in spite of all efforts, literature has failed? That it has failed to attract public attention, not only about shared human rights but also shared legal and political rights, and failed to translate that awareness into action, except amongst a small number of militants? As Judith Butler (2009) argues in Frames of War, it is a well-known fact that literature never got anyone out of prison or reversed the course of a war. Yet it does “provide the conditions for breaking out of the quotidian acceptance of war and for a more generalized horror and outrage that will support and impel calls for justice and an end to violence” (9–11).

In my own contribution to this issue, “Towards a Postcolonial Poetics and Aesthetics of Refuge”, I return to one constitutive principle of postcolonialism which is to intervene in and disrupt the power dynamics as embedded in discourse and as they regulate the relationship between north and south. Refugee literature and arts in Europe and the USA are not a “scandal” (Farrier 2011) for postcolonial studies but indeed have a lot to say with regard to the violence and unevenness of the current world order. It is, therefore, urgent for postcolonial scholars to respond to what I define as a refugee poetics and aesthetics by confronting consensual yet politically, ethically, and ideologically problematic modes of representation of forcibly displaced people, and by showcasing and analysing what literature and the arts propose in terms of alternative discourses, voices, and imaginaries. Beyond the urgent response, I argue that there is a long-term impact of refugee literature and arts in that their uprootedness and extraterritoriality interrogate default literary geographies defined along national borders and the default monolingual imaginary of national languages. Refugee literature and arts, as examined through postcolonial eyes, often constitute seminal experimentations with forms, genres, and languages, indicating, especially in an ecological vein, directions for postcolonial futures.

The interventions of artists, writers and activists also expose what is not visible to the eye of mainstream media or what is deliberately kept invisible. For instance, the Freed Voices collective mapped UK detention centres that until recently remained notoriously unmapped “for security reasons” and based their cartography on the visual memory of the detainees themselves. Freelance drawer Laura Genz contributes the cover image of this special issue, and a selection from her series of drawings of everyday life in the Paris and Calais camps. Prepared between June and November 2015, the series – 269 drawings in all – tells of the life on the street camps, where people newly arrived in France end up. Genz belongs to various collectives including Coordination 75 for the Undocumented (Coordination 75 des Sans Papiers; CSP75), the International Coalition for Undocumented Aliens and Migrants (Coalition Internationale des Sans Papiers et Migrants; CISPM) and the Migrants’ Kitchen (La Cuisine des Migrants). Contrary to what politicians and the media present as French “welcome” policy, she was able to document the undignified, violent, and absurd living conditions forced on newly arrived migrants labelled “irregular”. As a reaction to the dehumanizing “coverage” offered by the mass media, her work reflects the tension between police and media hypervisibility, social or self-protective invisibility, and militant en-visibilisation.

As I further explain in my article, the term “refugee” is an historical construction that privileged political and ideological considerations over economic and ecological ones. Yet economic and environmental concerns cannot be dissociated from the political and as Katherina Röhl (2005) proposes, we should invent a new encompassing category called the “basic needs” refugee that would take their inherent interconnectedness as its informing premise. World conflicts, which force people out of their living places in order to survive, are also about controlling natural supplies, including water, oil, and valuable ores. In spite of the fact that appeals for a more encompassing category have been officially recognized in the west since the 1985 report ordered by the UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme), it is only recently that eco-refugees and environmental factors in the displacement of persons have come to public attention as a result of scholarly engagement.³

In The Conflict Shoreline, the architect Eyal Weizman (see Weizman and Sheikh 2015) focuses on the “aridity line”, marking the limit beyond which growing cereal crops without irrigation becomes impossible. Weizman found a recurring interconnection between water, heat stress, conflicts – with the aridity line falling exactly on the bloodiest combat zones from Libya to Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan and Pakistan – and drone strikes. Added to this is another line of interconnected phenomena: civil uprisings (Massiot 2018), the displacement of populations, and resurgence of refugee writing. In their contribution titled “An Environmental History of Literary Resilience: ‘Environmental Refugees’ in the Senegal River Valley”, Mélanie Bourlet and Marie Lorin explore the relation between the environmental history of the Senegal River Valley (Mali, Senegal, Mauritania), oral and written Pulaar literature, and the processes of migration. They argue that refugees are “the human face” of climate change, economic and environmental inequalities, and armed conflict and observe that moments of ecological crisis and population displacement are also periods of intense linguistic activism and literary creativity. In this case, refugee literature acts as a mode of resistance and resilience against the perpetuation of colonial control, predation, and destruction, in “postcolonial” times.

The contributions included in this special issue recognize that the remit of postcolonial studies does not stop at the door of privileged forms of migration, and the article by Corina Stan distinguishes between diasporic, exilic, and refugee literatures. Indeed, a failure to provide such distinctions would amount to endorsing a position that ignores the unequal access to mobility and therefore dehistoricizes the “figure of the migrant” (Nail 2015), converting it into a universal theoretical category (Gallien 2017). In her close engagement with Jenny Erpenbeck’s (2017) novel Go, Went, Gone, Stan makes a case for refugee literature as a body of prose texts by and about refugees, which represent migration as part of a shared world. She argues that Go, Went, Gone establishes walls, paper(s) and water as tropes of refugee literature, turning them into meditations on the precariousness of foundational narratives. Despite the novel’s tendency to dramatize the lessons of ethical hospitality, Stan reads it as an invitation for readers to dwell on the discomfort of a global crisis that requires a political solution which transcends the fatalism of postcolonial self-doubt.

Given the postcolonial field’s commitment to cross-disciplinarity and to confronting imperialism in the form of political, economic, ecological, and cultural domination and predation, it seems appropriate to study refugee literature, and art as forms of poetic and political intervention. In her article “A Global Postcolonial: Contemporary Arabic Literature of Migration to Europe”, Johanna Sellman argues in favour of a co-theorization of Arabic migrant writing, border studies, and postcolonial theory. If in the 20th-century Arabic literature of exile the north–south and west–east paradigms were prevalent and groups of young, student, male migrants were featured as grappling with divided consciences and aspirations, she argues that today’s literature is more likely to depict the north and west as dystopic locations, their borders as places of wilderness and violence where characters undergo unheroic and painful self-transformations. Sellman’s overview of Arabic migration literature foregrounds its anti-hegemonic critique with reference to borders, citizenship, belonging and biopolitical management of populations.

Equally, Rita Sakr in her contribution addresses the representation of forced and clandestine migration in stories by Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim, from his collections The Madman of Freedom Square (Blasim [2009] 2016) and The Iraqi Christ (Blasim 2013), within an interdisciplinary conceptual framework that combines theories of biopolitics, ecocriticism, human rights discourse, heterotopia, and the aesthetics of “nightmare realism”. Her cross-theorization of Blasim’s refugee literature not only provides an adequate conceptual frame to analyse the heterotopic landscapes of the short stories and the less-than-human/more-than-human aspects of the figure of the refugee, but it also “reroutes” (Wilson, Lawson Welsh, and Sandru 2010) postcolonial ethico-political reflections – centred thus far on the ethics of representation – in more-than-humanist and ecological directions.

Said (2000) opened his essay “Reflections on Exile” with a warning against the aestheticization of exile: “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience” (173). He added that, given the scale of contemporary forced displacement, exile (by which he meant here forced migration) is no longer humanistically or aesthetically comprehensible:

[T]o think of the exile informing this literature as beneficially humanistic is to banalize mutilations, the losses it inflicts on those who suffer them, the muteness with which it responds to any attempt to understand it as “good for us.” Is it not true that the views of exile in literature and, moreover, in religion obscure what is truly horrendous: that exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical; that it is produced by human beings for other human beings; and that, like death without death’s ultimate mercy, it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography? (174)

The postcolonial contributions compiled in this special issue push against the ongoing colonial disposition concerning the diverse production and consumption of images of refugees and their literatures for neo-liberal marketplaces. For instance, in “No Country, No Cry: Literature of Women’s Displacement and the Reading of Pity”, Olivera Jokić focuses on two popular novels written by women about the civil war in former Yugoslavia, namely Slavenka Drakulić’s (2001) S: A Novel about the Balkans and Téa Obreht’s (2011) The Tiger’s Wife. She studies their problematic marketing and reception in the USA, as particularly tallying with western bourgeois women mis/representations. Emphasizing the variety of emotional engagements that refugee literature may trigger in its readers, Jokić argues that these popular Balkan novels imply the figure of a sovereign reader who cultivates a form of “sympathetic dis-identification”, removed by their safe middle-class position from the uncertainties and violence of refugee life. These female refugee representations are “desirable literary experiences” allowing their protagonists to be imagined as “demoralized, dependent, inactive, subjective, aestheticized, unambiguous and safe from ambivalence”, as well as allowing them to be “often racialized as ‘Muslim women’”.

As the contributions collected in this special issue demonstrate, English literature may be written in London and the East Midlands, but also in Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt. Literature in the UK may certainly appear in English but it may also be written in Arabic or in the hetereolingual interstice where transactions between two or more languages take place. Refugee literature is not (only) a literature of despair that dwells on the moral hypocrisy of the west. Nor is it only a form of testimonial literature depicting traumatic events and an urgent intervention to respond to a fictional “crisis”. In other words, its temporality reaches beyond the past, nostalgia, and trauma, but also beyond the present and its many urgencies. It is a literature where seminal experimentations with forms, genres, languages, and national literary constructions occur, thereby indicating, especially in its ecological vein, directions for postcolonial futures.

Brief reference needs to be made to the final article in this issue of JPW, by Hanan Ibrahim, an addition to but not part of the special issue on “Refugee Literature”, titled “The Question of Arab ‘Identity’ in Amin Maalouf’s Les Desorientés” (Maalouf 2013). Ibrahim examines this recent novel by Lebanese-Arab writer Maalouf for the way its protagonist, an exilic intellectual who embraces positions such as Islamic extremism and Marxism, avoids envisioning any political resistance to the social oppression following the Arab Spring. His refusal to engage politically reflects the chaos in Lebanon and other Arab countries in the region in the aftermath of these insurgencies.

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Claire Gallien

Claire Gallien teaches in the English Department at University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 and is affiliated to the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). She has published L’Orient anglais (2011) and a special issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies on contemporary Anglo Arab literatures in English and in translation (2017). Her current book project is From Corpus to Canon: Eastern Literary Traditions and Orientalist Reconfigurations in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain. She is also co-editing A Critical Muse: The World Imaginaries of Islam. Her research interests are in the critical study of orientalist discourse, and postcolonial, comparative and world literatures and theories, as well as in translation studies and decolonial practices.

Notes

1. A link to the programme may be found here: http://www.litterature-comparee.fr/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Prog_Refugee_Literature_Workshop_july_6_2017.pdf.

2. See Chambers and Gilmour (2018) for a selection of writings published between 2008 and 2017.

3. For instance, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) put into place an “environmental migration portal” and publishes, in association with universities, numerous studies on the subject: http://www.environmentalmigration.iom.int/#home. See also Gemenne, Ionesco, and Mokhnacheva (2016).