A global postcolonial: Contemporary Arabic literature of migration to Europe

ABSTRACT

In 21st-century Arabic literature of migration, modernist and earlier postcolonial discourses on exile and migration have been giving way to writings that grapple with subjectivities born of mass migration and the encounter with borders and borderlands. This article puts contemporary Arabic literature of forced or precarious migration to Europe in conversation with postcolonial studies, Arabic literary studies, and border studies. Though Arabic literature and postcolonial literary theory have not been adequately co-theorized, we can draw on approaches from postcolonial studies. The article suggests that the most urgent anti-hegemonic critiques in contemporary migration literature pertain to borders, citizenship, belonging within the kinds of precarity created in contemporary contexts of migration. In border studies, we find multiple approaches to querying borders and borderlands: as barriers that uphold global inequalities, sites of transformations, and liminal spaces from which meanings can be re-imagined.

KEYWORDS:

• Arabic literature
• migration
• exile
• borders
• postcolonial literature

Contemporary Arabic literature of migration in Europe is often labelled and marketed as exile literature (adab al-manfa). However, the valences of this term (and many of its cognates) are fluid and changing. In contemporary Arabic literature of forced migration to Europe, modernist and earlier postcolonial discourses on exile and migration found in literary narratives that centred on topics such as political exile, students travelling abroad for study, and labour immigration have been giving way to literature that explores the perspectives of refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants. This more recent writing grapples with subjectivities born of mass migration and encounters with borderlands (Anzaldúa 1987), and explores spaces located outside citizenship. Although terms such as “exile” and “migration” continue to be used to situate this literature, they are quite fluid. This spaciousness is vital and offers us a wide array of linkages and possibilities for situating and analysing these literary texts. While keeping the literature’s contemporary contexts in mind, we can also attend to the ways that it is being re-imagined with earlier literary texts and frameworks. One of the important questions to attend to is how to situate the postcolonial in these 21st-century literary texts of migration.

For example, in a review of Aqmar ʿIraqiyya Sawda’ fi al-Suwayd (Black Iraqi Moons in Sweden) by the Sweden-based Iraqi novelist ʿAli ʿAbd al-ʿĀl (2004), the reviewer places the book alongside classic colonial and postcolonial Arabic novels of migration to Europe, Hakim’s ([1938] 2008)ʿUsfur min al-Sharq (Bird of the East), Yahya Haqqi’s ([1944] 2004) Qandil Umm Hashim (The Lamp of Umm Hashim) and Tayeb Salih’s ([1966] 2009) Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal (Season of Migration to the North). A recurring trope in Aqmar is of an exile as a moon that has lost its orbit. Extending the metaphor of Salih’s iconic postcolonial novel Mawsim al-hijra, the reviewer notes that the characters in Aqmar are living a season of forced migration, mawsim tahjir. This metaphor situates the novel within a distinct period of time that both flows from and marks a break with a form of migration and literary expression located in a particular postcolonial past. How do we describe this new season?

Since the 1990s, Arabic literature of migration to Europe has increasingly foregrounded the perspectives of refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants. For example, numerous Arabic, francophone and anglophone harraga novels from the Maghreb, including those by writers such as Youssef Fadel, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Laila Lalamy, feature undocumented Mediterranean crossings and tell stories of those who choose to embark on them. Harraga, meaning “those who burn”, refers to the practice of burning citizenship documents before the crossing, but also figuratively, burning pasts. These literary narratives centre on the violence that border-building practices enact on migrants’ bodies and often draw on fantasy, different modalities of storytelling, and metaphors of wilderness to stage spaces outside citizenship. This genre of writing about undocumented crossings extends beyond North African literature to sub-Saharan African literatures and other Arabic literatures. Taytanikat Ifriqiyya (African Titanics) ([2008] 2014) by Ethiopian writer Abu Bakr Khaal and Der falsche Inder (The Village Indian) by Iraqi writer Abbas Khider ([2010] 2013) both draw on myth and popular storytelling motifs in crafting stories of undocumented migration. Furthermore, many short stories by Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim, now based in Finland, explore border crossings and the spaces of undocumented migration in settings such as Serbia, Turkey and Eastern Europe. Through a kind of “nightmare realism” Blasim’s stories explore a variety of border subversions, linking the crossing of borders in undocumented spaces to ways of imagining belonging and interconnections beyond citizenship.

In addition to these numerous literary narratives of undocumented migration, many Arabic literary narratives explore the perspectives of asylum seekers or refugees in Europe. Although these narratives do not typically focus on journeys or crossings, they share a focus on writing borderlands; that is, spaces outside normative citizenship. These writings are often deeply engaged with rewriting the modernist notions of exile that were dominant in Arabic literature, especially in the latter half of the 20th century. For example, in the 1990s and 2000s literary narratives by leftist Iraqi writers such as Haifa Zangana, Iqbal al Qazwini and Mahmoud al-Bayaty grappled with the shift from being political exiles to becoming refugees in different European countries (Sellman 2016). On a larger scale, numerous Arabic literary narratives explore asylum processes as well as the dynamics of mass migration. For example, in Al-Nadawi’s (2010) novel Taht Sama’ Kubinhaghin (Under the Copenhagen sky), the young protagonist Huda considers what it would take for her to transform herself into an exile writer. A daughter of Iraqi refugees who arrived in Denmark as a young child, she struggles to match her own experiences to discourses about exile and the exile writer. Why, she wonders, does exile feel so stifling? The subtext of many of her reflections is that the exilic condition, though painful, is supposed to be freeing and engender the possibility of individual detachment. The novel poetically explores the changing meanings of exile as well as citizenship in contexts of mass migration. Rasha Abbas (2018, 2016), a Syrian writer now based in Berlin, has explored border crossings and the war in Syria through the Absurd, and elements of science fiction and fantasy, in her 2018 short story collection Mulakhas Ma Jara (The gist of it) and written humorous accounts on the process of learning German in her Die Erfindung der deutschen Grammatik (The invention of German grammar), which was translated and published in German.

Though many different genres of Arabic literature are flourishing in Europe, including some that re-imagine diaspora and mobility in different ways from those discussed here, this article will focus specifically on Arabic literature of forced or precarious migration and on how some of our critical frameworks and comparative paradigms might change to better engage with it. Throughout, I use the terms “forced” or “precarious” migration to denote the broader material conditions that interact with the literature. The International Organization for Migration (IOM 2011) defines forced migration as “a migratory movement in which an element of coercion exists, including threats to life and livelihood, whether arising from natural or man-made causes”. Whereas categories such as “refugee” and “asylum seeker” describe specific trajectories towards citizenship in a country of arrival, forced migration encompasses a wide range of legal statuses and the variable (and often overlapping) elements that create an impetus to cross borders. Here, precarious migration (see also Paynter 2017; Squire 2018) draws on Judith Butler’s (2009) definition of precarity as a “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (25) and refers to the ways that the conditions of migration often increase vulnerability for migrants, especially in spaces outside established networks of support and citizenship. An inquiry into the literature that focuses on forced or precarious migration aligns with “border thinking” (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006), which asks us to think from the border and centre the languages and forms of knowledge that have been marginalized by colonial languages and epistemologies (207).

Given that these spaces and forms of migration are increasingly part of the global landscape, this article considers how we can make the shift to global or planetary¹ understandings of space and migration that is so critical to migration literature. Though I mostly use the term “global” in this article, the context and content of this literature on migration and border spaces emphasize the divisions and inequalities that are part of our current moment of globalization. I thus incorporate some of the planetary critiques of the way that the global often emphasizes unity and cross-border movement. The new aesthetics and politics of contemporary Arabic literature of migration are being created in the context of mobility and precarious migration and in a climate of heightened anxiety about state sovereignty, which animates border and wall regimes. Though I make reference to specific novels and short stories throughout, the article emphasizes approaches for reading this literature and its changing contexts. I argue for extending the scope of the postcolonial in Arabic literary studies to include the concerns and contexts of contemporary forced and precarious migration and the border-building practices that states employ in an attempt to limit or manage mobility. Specifically, I suggest that we can productively draw on frameworks from border studies to analyse what the postcolonial means in contemporary migration literature. These include questions about how communities and subjectivities are created by borders and border-building practices. Such queries help us see how the literature itself is theorizing these issues and, through its imaginative capacities, introducing new perspectives on this current “season of migration”.

Contemporary Arabic migration literature: Beyond the postcolonial?

In both migration studies and literary studies, references to the global are superseding the postcolonial. At the same time, global divisions of access, resources and mobility stem from postcolonial disparities. In his Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition, anthropologist Michel Agier (2016) writes:

Reference to the planet in its global dimensions is increasingly replacing a postcolonial conception of spaces of international migration (when migrants from the South headed for their former metropolises), and migrants no longer see the country of reception as the only country for their establishment. (46)

Here, Agier juxtaposes an understanding of postcolonial migration that is premised on migrants travelling to and settling in former colonial powers to a global or planetary conception of mobility where migrants move towards a broader array of spaces and often continue beyond the first new country they arrive in.² In this formulation, the shift from the postcolonial to the global pivots on an understanding of the postcolonial as an experience of continuing domination exerted by a former colonial nation on the one hand, and a conception of the global, where domination and inequities are more diffuse and migration patterns less clearly charted, defined as much by points of transit (Paynter 2018) as points of arrival.

Yet the conditions of contemporary mobility and border-building practices are both global and postcolonial. Postcolonial north–south disparities of access and resources profoundly shape migration. Borders often act as “asymmetric membranes” (Hedetoft 2003, 153) that allow free passage of global haves while creating liminal spaces or “borderlands” for other movers. Though the rise of economic nationalism and challenges to net neutrality in recent years interrogate the status quo, we are still largely living in an era of unprecedented global connectivity; while information, capital and goods move freely across borders for the most part, migration is increasingly policed. More border walls are being built than ever.

In the 21st century, the geographies of Arabic literature of migration to Europe have been rerouted in ways that echo Agier’s assertions about the global. Cities such as Berlin, Stockholm and Amsterdam have become important centres for Arab cultural production in Europe, displacing the primacy of London and Paris. Newer diasporas are reshaping the field of Arab and Arabic cultural production in Europe. Literary narratives themselves are shifting away from the themes and contexts of colonial and postcolonial Arabic exile literature, and exploring new aesthetics and modes of representing migration in a global context. In Arabic literature, the “cultural encounter” frameworks, “political commitment” and modernist understandings of exile of the 20th century have been giving way to new approaches to writing migration, including creative defamiliarization, new forms of testimonial narratives, and ventures into speculative genres.

Literary scholar Waïl Hassan (2002, 2018) argues that the field of Arabic literary studies has much to gain from the kinds of anti-hegemonic critique found in postcolonial studies and critical theory, even as these fields have not been adequately co-theorized.³ He notes (Hassan 2018) that the postcolonial tends to both denote how experiences of colonization and empire continue to shape global disparities and to indicate how literary studies, especially English, have defined a field of study. Hassan refers to cultural critic and historian Robert Young (2012), who argues that we should continue to use the idea of the postcolonial as long as the effects of colonialism continue to be present:

Analysis of such phenomena requires shifting conceptualizations, but it does not necessarily require the regular production of new theoretical paradigms: the issue is rather to locate the hidden rhizomes of colonialism’s historical reach, of what remains invisible, unseen, silent or unspoken. (20–21)

Hassan argues that the types of critique that are possible within the framework of postcolonial criticism are essential. However, there has been something of a disjuncture between the fields of postcolonial studies and Arabic literary studies, and they have not been adequately co-theorized (Hassan 2018, 163). Though Edward Said’s (1978)Orientalism was essential to creating postcolonial literary criticism, the field has largely been developed within English departments, and has tended to focus on anglophone texts as well as texts that “write back” to empire. Thus to do postcolonial studies in Arabic literature, Hassan argues, means moving beyond the contexts and areas of inquiry that have defined the field and attending to the changing meanings of the postcolonial:

Rigorous historicization demands that a reading of Sudanese writers of the generation following Ṣāliḥ’s, such as Jamal Mahjoub (a half-Sudanese, half- British Anglophone writer who revisits from another perspective the colonial history covered in Ṣāliḥ’s novel), Leila Aboulela (an Anglophone Sudanese-Scottish immigrant concerned with Muslim minorities in Britain at the turn of the twenty-first century), or Amır̄ Tāj al-Sirr (an Arabophone novelist pre-occupied with contemporary Sudan with its hybridity, inner migrations, and history) should follow different protocols, and presumably different trajectories of comparison. Rigorous historicization would reveal that even when dealing directly with colonialism and its ongoing legacy, those novelists’ concerns respond to realities that are significantly altered from those of the 1960s, realities that nevertheless call for anti-hegemonic critique. (2018, 167)

Similarly, the question of whether Arabic literary narratives of migration are “beyond the postcolonial” largely depends on what we mean by the term. Contemporary Arabic migration literature that stages the migration of refugees and clandestine migrants necessarily evokes north–south axes of power such as unevenly distributed access to mobility and the economic realities shaping migration. Furthermore, its settings in European spaces or en route to Europe further strengthen the push to read them through north–south postcolonial geographies. Tarek El-Ariss (2013), for example, has argued for reading literary texts as stages of confrontation between the material and its representations. Though the literary cannot be reduced to its sociological or political content, it is produced in interaction with them. “The literary thus designates a space of slippage, irreducible to representation and to materiality yet arising in between them and from their interaction” (11). El-Ariss (2016) figures literature as a space of confrontation between ideologies, genres and modes of writing and in contemporary literature, between the virtual and printed page:

It is the current state of disintegration, facing the archaic in all its forms, that accentuates the urgency to rethink the literary no longer as a representation but as a stage of confrontation, as a stage of cruelty that exposes the violence of belonging, exclusion, and violence. (90)

Read through these lenses, contemporary Arabic literature of migration creates spaces of confrontation with concepts of rights, identity, indeed the human, which are laid bare in the transitory spaces of migration. In literature, are new forms of relationality distinct from the east–west discourses of previous Arabic literature about travel to Europe and far from the modernist understandings of exile as a form of detachment that offers, in the words of Caren (1987), a “view from afar” (13–14, cited in Malkki 1995, 513)? Seeing citizenship, for example, in spaces of transition, from the outside or on the border, allows for contrasting ways of imagining the self and community in relation to the world. Literature thus offers an important space for retelling migration narratives, not necessarily as a testimony to personal experiences, but as an engagement with contemporary predicaments such as the meanings of borders and citizenship and the questions and imaginaries elicited by them.

To situate contemporary Arabic literature of forced or precarious migration in relation to previous postcolonial articulations, the following section surveys some trends in the postcolonial Arabic literature of travel to Europe as well as its adjacent literary critical frameworks. Awareness of these helps us situate the contemporary literature of forced migration in relation to literary and historical contexts.

Postcolonial Arabic literature of migration: Themes and frameworks

In one of the broadest surveys of Arabic literature of travel to the “west”, Arab Representations of the Occident: East–West Encounters in Arabic Fiction, Rasheed El-Enany (2006) emphasizes how the categories of east and west that originated in European orientalist thought were adopted by Arab intellectuals and came to permeate the literary enterprize of writing Europe after Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt until the early 2000s. El-Enany’s book offers a useful periodization of the literature: the pre-colonial period (“Enchanted Encounters”), the colonial interwar years (“Encounters under Duress”), early postcolonial and nationalist period (“Proud Encounters”) and the post-1967 period (“Humbled Encounters”). El-Enany shows that discourses on the “west”, whether hostile, ambivalent or desiring, have for a long time been deeply embedded in structures of power and domination. Similarly, the “west” has signified differently in literary narratives through different historical moments and in relation to various ideological and aesthetic positionings. The dual face of Europe as a force of economic, political and cultural domination and promising progress and human rights is inscribed into the literary genre.

It will be helpful to briefly summarize some of the major trends of this colonial and postcolonial genre of writing the west in Arabic literature. Several of the now classic Arabic novels of travel to Europe were written during the interwar period when resistance to forms of European colonialism was articulated. In Egypt in particular, burgeoning nationalism, resistance to British control of Egyptian politics and economy, and the search for an independent national culture shaped the writing. Tawfiq Hakim’s ([1938]2008) short novel, ’Usfur min al-Sharq (Bird of the East), depicts the young idealistic student Muhsin’s travel to Paris, reinforcing the familiar binaries of a spiritually rich east and a materialist and morally bankrupt west. Similar romantic self-orientalizing occurs in Yahya Haqqi’s classic 1944 novella, Qandil Umm Hashim (translated in 1984 as The Lamp of Umm Hashim). Unlike ’Usfur min al-Sharq, instead of positing the east and its romantic spirituality as a source of Europe’s progress and prosperity, it attempts to enact a synthesis between the two poles. As El-Enany shows, in the early postcolonial period of the 1950s and 1960s, a period of Arab nationalism and decolonization, many literary narratives about the “west”, such as Yusuf Idriss’s (1962) novella, Al-Siyyida Fiyina (Madam Vienna), or Fathi Ghanim’s (1960) novel, Al-Sakhin wa-l-Barid (The Hot and the Cold), retain the east–west binaries but performatively diffuse or subvert them.

The one Arabic novel that has been incorporated into a world literature/postcolonial canon is Tayeb Salih’s ([1966] 2009) Season of Migration to the North, a forceful literary deconstruction of Nahda ideologies and east–west binaries. The novel begins in 1956, at the time of Sudan’s independence from Britain. The first-person account of a narrator who has just returned home following the completion of a doctorate in English poetry intersects with the narration of Mustafa Saeed, an outsider who has moved to the village, who confides the secrets of his former life to him. A prodigal child of the colonial school system, Mustafa had moved swiftly through its ranks, studying in Cairo, acquiring a doctorate in London and becoming a well-known professor of colonial economics. In contrast to characters such as Muhsin from Hakim’s ‘Usfur min al-Sharq or Ibrahim from Haqqi’s Qandil Umm Hashim, Mustafa is cold and calculating. He creates an extravagantly orientalized lair where he seduces women of all social classes, driving two of them to suicide and killing his wife. He thus performs an inversion of colonial violence, exposing the east–west binary as a “lie”, and, as discussed extensively by Waïl Hassan (2003), dramatically refigures the east–west discourse of the genre to the north–south dynamics of postcolonialism.

The strong indictment of a colonial and postcolonial elite makes Season of Migration to the North a prescient commentary on the 1967 naksa, or “setback”. Just as the 1967 Arab defeat by Israel came to symbolically mark the end of the Nahda project and the failure of secular postcolonial politics and thought, initiating an intellectual project of self-critical introspection, so 1967 marked a dramatic shift in Arabic literary narratives of travel to and exile in Europe. However, unlike Season of Migration to the North’s performative parodying and undoing of colonial east–west discourses, there is a re-emergence of pronounced east–west binaries in many post-1967 literary narratives of travel and migration to Europe. These are transformed though a focus on social and political oppression in the Arab world operating alongside an idealization of Europe. For example, Sulayman Fayyad’s ([1972] 1993) novel Aswat (Voices) depicts the return of a successful Egyptian émigré to his home village in Egypt with his French wife, Simone, whose beauty, intelligence, curiosity and empathy are a counterpoint to village culture. Another narrative emblematic of the post-1967 discourse of crisis is Moroccan writer Mohamed Zafzaf’s (1972) Al-Mar’a wa al-Warda (The woman and the flower), a novel about the return to home where the challenges are contrasted to European humanism, represented through the figure of a Danish woman. Here too, a sense of vitality and salvation is projected onto an idealized other.

A more pronounced exile literature emerged in the post-1967 period, which was shaped by the spirit of self-critique that dominated the intellectual production of this period. Although the idea of manfa (exile as a place of negation) and ghurba (a feeling of being estranged, or gharib, that also implicates a state of being in the west, gharb) coincides with nostalgia and longing for home, exile and travel literature in the post-1967 period tends to idealize European spaces and re-centre the east–west categories that had long been part of this genre. Among the political exile novels from this period are Syrian writer Hanna Mina’s ([1984] 1986) novel, Al-Rabi’ wa al-Kharif (Spring and autumn), which is set in the mid-1960s in communist Hungary, and Egyptian writer Baha’ Tahir’s ([1995] 2001) novel Al-Hubb fi-l-manfa (Love in exile).

The idea of exile, manfa, which at once conjures displacement, alienation and estrangement, has a formidable lineage in modern Arabic prose and poetry; it is not surprising that literary narratives often continue to be framed as exile literature. In Arabic literature, as in other literatures, exile has often carried the resonances of modernism. For example, the modernist poetry of writers such as Iraqi Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati who themselves were estranged from Iraqi postcolonial governments made exile another lens through which to explore poetic experimentation and the alienating aspects of modernity. Palestinian poet and writer Hussein Barghouthi (1984, 2001) has written extensively on exile as both physical displacement and an internal state of estrangement in both poetry and prose.

Modernist understandings of exile have tended to differentiate between the displaced intellectual and the refugee. The transformations of the meaning of exile in contemporary writings often reflect the undoing of such hierarchies. Anthropologist Liisa Malkki (1995) has noted that the term “exile” has tended to align with modernist aesthetics and questions about the human condition whereas “refugee” evokes mass displacement and the institutions that manage them. “Exile”, she writes, “connotes a readily aestheticizable realm, whereas the label ‘refugees,’ connotes a bureaucratic and international humanitarian realm” (513). Why is there this division between some types of mobility and displacement conceived as amenable to artistic representation and other types to the logic of bureaucracy and politics? What are the reasons for (and consequences of) separating exile literature from the contexts that create and manage displacement, and artistic and cultural production of mass displacement from a broader literary or art world? These divisions have a lot to do with the privileging of art that maintains a sense of “autonomy” separate from its political social and economic contexts. To insist on autonomy is often to stake a claim in hierarchies of prestige.

It is this aestheticization of exile that Edward Said (2002) critiqued in “Reflections on Exile”. If the realities of exile include the painful and irretrievable loss of homeland and community, he asks, why do critics insist on abstracting and idealizing exile, why do we de-historicize it and detach it from the material and political conditions that produce it?

If true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has it been transformed so easily into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture? We have become accustomed to thinking of the modern period itself as spiritually orphaned and alienated, the age of anxiety and estrangement. (Said 2002, 173).

Exile, he suggests, holds a privileged position in literary studies because it has come to signify the detachment that produces creativity and originality of vision.

As Said notes, the problem with abstracting the exilic condition is that it de-historicizes exile, overwrites the real pain of displacement and, importantly, obscures the structural conditions of mass displacement. He writes:

You must first set aside Joyce and Nabokov and think instead of the uncountable masses for whom UN agencies have been created. You must think of the refugee-peasants with no prospect of ever returning home, armed only with a ration card and an agency number.[ … ] you must leave the modest refuge provided by subjectivity and resort instead to the abstractions of mass politics. (2002, 176)

Said’s injunction that literary critics turn to the abstractions of mass politics has, in many ways, been realized with the subsequent turn to postcolonial and cultural studies approaches in comparative literature and, to some extent, in Arabic literary studies.

In her recent book The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile, and the Nation, Zeina Halabi (2017) shows some ways in which the post-1990s period has seen an unravelling of modernist understandings of exile and the intellectual in Arabic literature and other forms of art and cultural expression. She focuses especially on how for many Arab intellectuals and writers, the “exile” was something very distinct from the “refugee”, an imperative distinction for those who positioned themselves as catalysts of change (83).

As Halabi’s book argues, the unravelling of modernist understandings of the exile and intellectual since the 1990s has coincided with the emergence of new conceptions of the political and the status of the intellectual, writer or artist. Importantly, in contemporary literary texts and elsewhere, 20th-century understandings of intellectuals and exiles as catalysts for change are being demystified and de-romanticized. Indeed, the frameworks discussed above – the north–south analyses of postcolonial studies, the east–west discourses of Arabic travel and migration literature to Europe and the concept of exile, manfa – are being transformed in the new contexts that contemporary migration literature stages.

Reading Arabic literature of migration at the border

Literary texts exist in an ecology of critical and creative thought that is imagining what other models or ways of being might accommodate human mobility and the alternate and multiple belongings that movement so often creates. There is an alignment between the kinds of question being posed in border studies and the way that Arabic literary narratives of forced migration are imagining the liminal spaces of borders and borderlands that many refugees, asylum seekers and migrants inhabit and pass through. As Michel Agier (2016) reminds us in Borderlands, borders are constructed and not natural. They are shifting, unstable, and must be continuously re-created through ritual and performance. They “may still be ‘good for thinking’ and ‘good for living’” (15), he suggests, if they become the basis of relationality and not enclosures that silence or exclude others.

In “At the Borders of Citizenship: A Democracy in Translation?”, border studies scholar Etienne Balibar (2010) states that borders are constitutive of a “transindividual relationship, or being in the world when it is predicated on a plurality of subjects” (316; my italics). In the most general sense, borders help construct our relationships to the world and to each other; when we create borders, whether legal or social, we demarcate community and exclusion and create liminal border spaces. Secondly, Balibar posits that borders are spaces of paradox and antimony. For example, he argues, we can understand borders both through a “paradigm of war” and a “paradigm of translation”. On the one hand, the mechanisms of state sovereignty seek to manage and restrict mobility. On the other, borders are also constituted through collective and negotiable notions of identity and belonging, including creative practices. In this sense, borders can be understood as spaces of heterotopia. He writes that borders are “both a place of exception where the conditions and the distinctions of normality and everyday life are ‘normally suspended’ [ … ] and a place where the antimonies are [ … ] manifested and become an object of politics itself” (Balibar 2010, 31). Balibar suggests that the spaces of exception that are outside citizenship are simultaneously where border-building practices and the inequities that they uphold are most intensely made manifest.

In this sense of the transindividual, to write migration literature is to imagine a changing relationship to a world that is simultaneously individual and communally oriented. I suggest that the notion of the transindividual takes on a heightened significance in recent Arabic literature of forced migration because it so often stages individual narratives within and in relation to larger modes of legal and social belonging whose parameters are being constituted and undone by border-building practices. Furthermore, the contemporary literature of precarious and forced migration offers a space for imagining the transformations and paradoxes of the border. For instance, a focus on “transindividual awareness” can entail an exploration of the antimonies of borders such as the tension between individually felt subjectivities and an awareness of states’ management of migration and restrictions on migration, or of asylum systems that make human trafficking the only available modes of transnational mobility for many. Hannah Arendt’s (1951) assertion in Origins of Totalitarianism that the “right to have rights” is anchored in national citizenship remains pertinent even as more and more people find themselves in the extended and precarious borderlands outside full citizenship.

One way that these outside spaces and borderlands are being imagined in Arabic literature of forced or precarious migration is through the semantic fields of wilderness and nature. For instance, a number of literary narratives use metaphors of nature and the wilderness to imagine alternate forms of hospitality in spaces that are outside citizenship: Farouq Yousef’s (2007, 2011) poetic diaries that meditate on the Swedish forests as a site of infinite hospitality, for example, or Ibrahim Ahmad’s ([1994] 2008) short story “Laj’ ‘ind al-Iskimu” (“The Arctic Refugee”). Furthermore, in many narratives, wilderness comes to denote states of exception where the conventions of law and human community cede and unmediated violence intrudes. In Abu Bakar Khaal’s ([2008] 2014) Titanikat Ifriquiyya (African Titanics), Mahi Binebine’s ([1999] 2003) Cannibales (Welcome to Paradise) and Youssef Fadel’s (2000) Hashīsh we find a variety of metaphors (cannibalism, beasts, sea monsters and more) in the staging of these borderlands-turned-wilderness. In Hassan Blasim’s ([2009] 2013) stories of migration, wilderness often emerges in narratives that stage routes of human trafficking. In “Shahinat Berlin” (“Truck to Berlin”), published in The Madman of Freedom Square, for example, a group of Iraqi men perish in a Serbian forest when a trafficker abandons a locked truck. To describe what takes place in the truck, the narrator returns to the idea that the boundaries between humans, animals and monsters have been dissolved. A scream arises that seems to belong to nobody and everybody:

When they heard the scream, they tried to imagined the source of this voice, neither human nor animal, which had rocked the darkness of the truck [ … ]. It seems that the cruelty of man, the cruelty of animals and legendary monsters had condensed and together had started to play a hellish tune. (Blasim [2009] 2013, 72)

In the story, a Serbian policeman later recalls a lone survivor – a wolf – escaping the truck and disappearing into the forest. Here, transmutation between humans, whose mobility is managed by states, and animals, whose mobility is less regulated, also becomes a rich site of meaning. They recur in several of Blasim’s short stories of the forced and precarious. Nature and wilderness at once come to signify states of exception and outside conventional politics even as they become rich sites for exploring many different kinds of belonging and the role that storytelling plays in creating them.

Thus, many narratives of forced and precarious migration imagine novel forms of community and inter-belonging. Such creative inquiries into how communities are and can be constituted, especially in an age of online connectivity and intensified globalization, constitute a kind of transindividual awareness. At a moment when some theorists are rethinking the category of the citizen – our foundation for theorizing political community – in light of the way that it is produced through exclusions (see Butler 2015; Brandzel 2016), literary narratives of migration are imagining other forms of community and connectivity. In contemporary Arabic literature of forced and precarious migration, this is a recurring theme that appears in multiple forms. For instance, the fantasy novel Yuru (Euro) by Syrian writer Nadhir Zuʻbi (2016) is narrated in the voice of a Greek Euro and then by a young man who slowly turns into steel, abandons his human relationships and joins the parallel society to which Euro and all other metal objects belong. A fantasy reflection on mobility, the novel defamiliarizes understandings of the relationship between border crossings, value, and the boundaries of the human. Hassan Blasim’s short stories also frequently accentuate and imagine the linkages, blending and networks that link community in ways that often subvert national borders and the integrity of the individual body and subject. Entities such as viruses, search engines and shared bodily fluids call attention to the ways that human beings are porous, networked and interconnected.

Such literary imaginings take us into the realm of the strange, unexpected and unfamiliar, and sometimes into literary genres such as fantasy and science fiction. Indeed, defamiliarization has become an important component of writing borders and migration. Here too, the questions raised by the literature intersect with those of border studies, broadly conceived. For example, philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s (2006) writings on a “nomadic ethics” aim to capture the urgency of defamiliarizing habitual and legally encoded modes of belonging. In Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics she argues that cultivating a de-centred view of the subject that takes into account the forces that traverse us and our mutual interdependencies can better situate us to respond to the major ethical challenges that we face in the 21st century, including mass displacement. This process of untangling oneself from common ways of identifying with familiar identities and belongings, she argues, entails a disidentification from the naturalized link between citizen and nation and is perhaps most familiar to those who have experienced displacement (84). From this standpoint, a re-imagining of multi-local belongings and interconnections such as those we see in literary narratives is an ethical practice. A part of historicizing this particular moment of the postcolonial in Arabic literature pertains not only to the inequalities that shape migration and border-building practices, but also to how the literature explores and imagines forms of connectivity, belonging and undoing in conversation with contemporary realities of forced and precarious migration. As suggested earlier, defamiliarization is a central strategy in many literary narratives, a mode that departs significantly from the focus on cultural encounters and modernist exile in 20th-century postcolonial narratives. The literature’s venturing into speculative modes of depicting migration creates means of defamiliarizing and re-imagining the borders that create relationships with the world and ways of inquiring into the way that borders create community and liminal spaces.

Conclusion

This article has focused on theoretical and comparative paradigms for reading contemporary Arabic literature of forced migration or precarious migration to Europe. The literature itself is vast and varied and, certainly, different narratives call for different modes of reading and framing. My intention here has been to situate this corpus of writing in a way that engages it as literature/art and as situated within contexts of border-building and large-scale migration, thus challenging the modernist hierarchies between exile and refugee literature. We can be attentive to the aesthetics of writing precarious migration and large-scale migration without losing sight of how these intervene in the politics and history of our time. Contemporary Arabic migration literature is both postcolonial and global/planetary. I suggest that the most urgent anti-hegemonic critiques in contemporary migration literature pertain to borders, citizenship, belonging, and the biopolitical management of populations. In border studies, we find multiple approaches to querying borders and borderlands: as barriers that uphold global inequalities, sites of transformations, and as liminal spaces from which meanings can be re-imagined.

Perspectives from the border align with an emergent ethics and politics of a global age. We have yet to create the political frameworks and kinds of border that account for the global challenges of our age and the mobility, displacements and changing subjectivities that emerge from them. To grapple with these emergent political frameworks, we should attend to the narratives and ideas that are emerging from the borderlands, including those being formulated in migration literature. The undoing and remaking of subjectivities that are staged in migration literature are an important part of this conversation. By locating literary texts as spaces of confrontation between representation and material reality, we can respond to the theorizations of borders, the meaning of the citizen and the human, and the mobilities that occur within and beyond them. As our age of unprecedented mobility and its attendant anxieties (which are playing out in nativist politics all over the world), calls for creative and non-habitual responses to the pulls between the state sovereignties and rights to mobility, we have a lot to gain by exploring the imaginative and defamiliarizing capacities of literature.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Johanna Sellman

Johanna Sellman is assistant professor of Arabic literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. She received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Texas at Austin. She has authored articles on the changing meanings of exile in post-1990s Arabic literature, Arab Nordic theatre, and the pedagogy of teaching the Arabic language through literature. Her current book project, Borders of Belonging, analyses the transformations of Arabic migration literature in an era of mobility, displacement and globalization.

Notes

1. The notion of the planetary is come into being in conversation with the global. In general, it critiques the inequalities of globalization and the totalizing way that it has often been theorized. Like most perspectives on globalization, writings on the planetary focus on the intensification of interconnections and relationality. However, they often emphasize ways that the global excludes and creates divisions (Miyoshi 2001) and how to theorize the areas that fall outside the often-rationalist categories of economy, media and profit (Moraru 2015). Some have used the planetary as a starting point to theorize critique (Bunz, Kaiser, and Thiele 2017).

2. For a discussion of contemporary North African movement and migration beyond established postcolonial routes and discourses, see Abderrezak (2016).

3. The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East (Bell and Mattar 2018) is the first essay collection to attempt to create a broader framework for postcolonial Middle East studies.