The importance of reading refugee literature

BORDER STORIES THAT RESOUND: WHY REFUGEE
LITERATURE ARE IMPORTANT WORKS OF FICTION

SIM POH LING CHRISTABEL

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE
2012
 


BORDER STORIES THAT RESOUND: WHY REFUGEE
LITERATURE ARE IMPORTANT WORKS OF FICTION

SIM POH LING CHRISTABEL
(BA (Hons), NUS)

A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR
THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS (RESEARCH)
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE
2012


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Table of Contents
Summary

iii

Chapter 1: Introduction

1

Chapter 2: The Post-World War II Refugee

3

Early Use of “Refugee”

3

The Impact of World War II

5

The United Nations and the Modern Refugee

10

The Immigrant and the Exile

16

Media

19

Who is the Refugee?

21

Chapter 3: What is Refugee Literature?

22

Listening to the Refugee Speak: Difficulties of Representation

22

Literary Texts: the Power to Question Doxologies

29

Article Review: Fictionalizing

33

Of Testimonio

37

Chapter 4: UNHCR Fictions and their Claims to Literariness and Authenticity
Lesson Module: “Refugee Children”

42
43

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Lesson Module: “The Depiction of Refugee Experience in Literature”

51

UNHCR Comics: Refugee Children 2000 and Refugee Children 2007

59

Chapter 5: What is the What and its Claims to Literariness and Authenticity

68

The Novel-Autobiography

72

Co-Authorship and Literariness

90

Chapter 6: Conclusion

102

Works Cited

104

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Summary
While there is a lot of writing produced as a result of refugee studies, there is, presently,
no go-to source of critical writings on refugee literature. This essay, thus, attempts to
critically analyze some key examples of refugee literature from a theoretical perspective.
In particular, the essay will look at UNHCR literary fictions and Dave Eggers’s novel,
What is the What. With Wolfgang Iser’s notions of “fictionalizing as an act of
overstepping” (Iser 939) the reality of lived experiences guiding our understanding of
refugee literature, this essay argues that it is the defamiliarization of the refugee from its
doxological representations through the use of fictional technique that enables refugee
literature to rise above individual refugee experiences to foreground the urgency of the
worldwide condition of refugees post-World War II.
Furthermore, if literary fictions can reproduce the illusion of the refugee
experience for readers, then refugee literature can be considered successful in its act of
fictionalizing. The successful texts do more than enlarge the experience for their readers;
they are the hope of survival for all other refugees, that these refugees too can one day
share their stories.


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Chapter 1: Introduction
Giorgio Agamben’s essay on the implications of refugees in the nation-state, in response
to Hannah Arendt’s “We Refugees,” is predicated on the inherent contradiction between
the “temporary condition [of the refugee] that should lead to either naturalization or to

repatriation” (116) and the “permanently resident mass of noncitizens, who neither can be
nor want to be naturalized or repatriated” (117). To Agamben, this permanent presence of
noncitizens must play itself out in two forms of how refugees are considered: either these
refugees are destined to die in extermination camps (as did the denationalized Jews and
gypsies in the Holocaust) or these refugees are to be considered as the incarnation of a
renewed understanding of citizenship where all members of political communities are “in
[positions] of exodus or refuge” (118). The first consideration of death is a non-option,
because it points towards the self-extermination of the human existence through political
discrimination. The second option is an idealistic one, because it calls for the surrender of
traditional notions of boundaries and political power to a new understanding of
“reciprocal extraterritorialities” (118) in which everyone is nothing more than a refugee.
However, because extermination camps threaten the very rubric of society and the
unending conflicts of space and cultures result in innumerable people being forcibly
displaced, the world cannot overlook the position that refugees occupy in society.
While naturalization and repatriation are options, I am, like Agamben, interested
in the overspill – those refugees who cannot be (or have yet to be) naturalized or
repatriated. Agamben’s essay harks back to Arendt’s assertion that “[t]hose few refugees
who insist upon telling the truth . . . get in exchange for their unpopularity one priceless
advantage: history is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the


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privilege of Gentiles” (119). While Arendt was talking about Jewish refugees of the
Second World War in her article, Agamben extended her assertion to all European
refugees. In the present day, Arendt’s assertion can be further expanded to include
refugees of all sorts, especially since the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees’s (hereafter known as UNHCR) Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees
(hereafter shortened to Protocol) formalized the term “refugee” to reach beyond Europe

and the Second World War to “new refugee situations that have arisen since the
Convention was adopted and that the refugees concerned may therefore not fall within
the scope of the Convention” (46). Refugees can be found all over the world today, even
though there are higher concentrations of refugee situations in the economically poorer
countries. The sheer number of refugees that the world faces today – they number at 10.5
million when tabulated at the end of 2010 (Global Trends 2010 2) – increases the
urgency with which everyone who is a citizen of any nation-state in the world today has
to consider about the role of the refugee in the community in which he or she exists. Who
is the refugee and how is he or she figured in discourses emerging from the Second
World War? If a refugee is to be a permanent noncitizen of a host country, how should he
or she be accepted or repelled?
Arendt suggests that the answers lie with the “truth” that refugees tell, in that
“[r]efugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples – if
they keep their identity” (Arendt, “We” 119). Agamben argues that “the refugee is the
sole category in which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits of a political
community to come” (Agamben 114). However, while there is a lot of writing produced
as a result of refugee studies, there is, presently, no go-to source of critical writings on


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refugee literature. This essay, thus, will begin by examining the figure of the refugee and
its representations in public discourses to gain an understanding of how the refugee is
understood in historical, socio-political and academic terms. Then, the essay will look
more closely at representations of refugee experiences in literary fictions in order to start
to understand what “truth” (Arendt, “We” 119) Arendt is pointing to and how such
literary figurations of the refugee are crucial to furthering our overall levels of knowledge
and critical reflection on issues such as the presence and treatment of refugees. With
Wolfgang Iser’s notions of “fictionalizing as an act of overstepping” (Iser 939) the reality

of lived experiences guiding our understanding of refugee literature, this essay argues
that it is the defamiliarization of the refugee from its doxological representations through
the use of fictional technique that enables refugee literature to rise above individual
refugee experiences to foreground the urgency of the worldwide condition of refugees
post-World War II.
Chapter 2: The Post-World War II Refugee
Early Use of “Refugee”
The earliest use of the word “refugee” as a term to refer to people “who [have]
been forced to leave his or her home and seek refuge elsewhere” (“refugee, n.”) that is
recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) is an entry dating back
to 1692. The entry reads so:
He [sc. James II] wanted nothing but Power to make himself Absolute, and to
make us all Papists, or Martyrs, or Refugees.


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Thus, by this description, a refugee is someone who flees from the dominant religious
order of the day (Roman Catholicism) because of persecution by the ruling power. This is
supported by another specific definition of “refugee” in the same OED Online entry, in
which the term is used to refer to “[a] Protestant who fled France to seek refuge
elsewhere from religious persecution in the 17th and 18th centuries” (“refugee, n.”).
The third definition of “refugee” in the OED Online links early uses of the word
“refugee” with notions of criminality, in that a refugee is “a person who is fleeing from
justice, deserved punishment, etc.; a runaway, a fugitive” (“refugee, n.”). Such a
definition resonates with other early uses of the word and most notably resonates with the
Hebraic concept of cities of refuge. References to these cities of refuge can be found in
the Torah, the Koran, and the Bible. Asylum is offered to two groups of people who flee
to cities of refuge: firstly, people who had murdered and were awaiting trial; secondly,

people who had inadvertently murdered other people without murderous intent. These
cities of refuge are set aside so that “every one that killeth any person unawares may flee
thither” and are to serve as unbiased safe havens “for the children of Israel, and for the
stranger, and for the sojourner among them” (Authorized King James Version, Num.
35.15). Within the boundaries of these cities, the refugee is safe from unjust persecution
and revenge until the time of his or her trial. The refugee’s physical needs are anticipated
and met by these cities of refuge for the presence of this presupposed place of refuge is
independent of the existence of refugees.


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The Impact of World War II
Unlike these versions of the early refugee who are persecuted by religious
dominion or who were accused of criminal intent, the refugee which emerged out of the
Second World War is a very different figure. Arendt, a German Jew who fled to America
in World War II, wrote of such evolution:
A refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act
committed or some political opinion held. Well, it is true we [non-religious Jews]
have had to seek refuge; but we committed no acts and most of us never dreamt of
having any radical opinion. With us the meaning of the term “refugee” has
changed. Now “refugees” are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to
arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by Refugee
Committees. (“We” 110)
From Arendt’s description, the refugee has become someone whose status as refugee
outlasts his or her act of fleeing (the actual duration of travel), because his or her new life
in the new country in which he or she arrives is underlined by his or her refugee status.
After all, all refugees are to be helped by “Refugee Committees,” committees which only
serve to reinforce the refugee’s lack of citizenship and his or her position outside of the

local community. Thus, the modern-day refugee is neither a citizen in his or her
homeland nor a citizen of any country to which he or she may be relocated. The refugee
perpetually seeks refuge because of his or her status of constant transience.
This marker of flight is at the core of the name itself: the verb, “refuge” forms the
word “refugee.” OED Online traces its etymology to “se réfugier” (“to take refuge”) and


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“refuir” (“to flee”) (“refuge, v.”), indicating that refugees take refuge in the act of fleeing.
Michael Quinion, a linguist who has collaborated with the Oxford English Dictionary,
also notes that “refugee” has its roots in the Latin word, “refugium,” which means “a
place of refuge, in which the core is fugere, to flee”. From the etymology, we begin to see
how the modern-day refugee finds refuge in nature of flight and how naturalization and
repatriation are not always achievable aims.
The most significant event to shape the modern-day understanding of refugee is
the Second World War. During the war, the Nazis sought to eradicate the Jewish people
and anyone who was sympathetic towards the Jews. They aimed to do so not because the
Jews had committed a crime but simply because they were Jewish. The Jews were
targeted and persecuted because of their ethnicity. In Nazi Germany, Jews were
conceived of as less than human and thus undeserving of life in Aryan Germany. People
who were found to be sympathetic to Jews were persecuted. At the same time, millions of
forced laborers were brought into the Nazi-controlled regions of Europe to work, adding
to the number of stateless people who found that they could not return to their home
countries after the war.
The German nationalist philosophies that gave rise to the totalitarian Nazi policies
and their barbaric treatment of the Jews must also be considered and are well-described in
the article, “Lazarus Bendavid’s and J. G. Fichte’s Kantian Fantasies of Jewish
Decapitation in 1793.” Sven-Erik Rose, the author, writes that both Bendavid and Fichte

theorized that “the only way to accommodate Jews into the civil sphere was through the
paradoxical and gruesome means of (symbolic) decapitation” (73), in order to distinguish


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between the “enlightened Mensch1” and the “backward and timorous Jews” (77). Both
Bendavid and Fichte helped to create a perception of the Jew as the un-Mensch figure
who is without integrity or honor. Rose asserts, based on Bendavid’s argument of how
“the Jews turned, as a last resort, to a moral attack, hoping to regain their lost homeland
not by might but rather through moral improvement” (77), that it is this specter of a lost
homeland and the failure of the Jewish moral war that led the Germans to perceive the
Jews as a morally faulty race. Because the Jews were perceived to be morally faulty and
therefore inhuman, such a perception provided a legitimate basis upon which the
Germans were to “[sever] from the collective monster of the Jewish people by a force so
absolute in its violence that it paradoxically obliterates any traces of its violence:
decapitation” (90). Fichte’s argument is similar. To Fichte, Jews were “ineligible for
inclusion in the civil contract of the larger state” and “the only means [Fichte could] see
for including the Jews in the civil contract would be to cut off their heads and to replace
them with different heads totally free of Jewish ideas” (90). These anti-Semitic
philosophies formed the basis of Nazism, an anti-Semitic political party and school of
thought that sought to exclude Jews from civil society, human rights and life.
Two examples help to illustrate the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. The first,
Joshua Hagen’s study of “The Most German of Towns: Creating an Ideal Nazi
Community in Rothenburg ob der Tauber,” reveals how anti-Semitism reached its
pinnacle in Nazism:

                                                            
1

 “Mensch” is the German word for “a person of integrity or rectitude; a person who is morally just, 
honest, or honourable” (“Mensch, n.”). 


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Less than one year after beginning to reframe the tourist experience, historical
preservation, and consumer culture in Rothenburg, a racial cleansing program
began to crystallize around the same themes of cleanliness, purity, and national
belonging. . . . First local leaders rewrote the history of Rothenburg’s Jewish
community to conform to Nazi thinking. Anti-Semitism was then incorporated
into the town’s medieval architecture before finally turning directly against the
Jewish community. (219)
From this excerpt, we can see how Jews were first barred from participating in the
Rothenburg community’s activities in the build-up to the Holocaust. These Jews were
then written out of their local history before finally being expelled from the place
altogether (221). Rothenburg became the example for other towns in Germany to follow.
The second example is Art Spiegelman’s two-volume graphic novel, Maus. Maus
tells of the experiences of Art’s father, Vladek Spiegelman, and how he survives
Auschwitz to live out his old age in America. All the Jews depicted in the graphic novel
are drawn as mice and the opening quote to the second volume, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,
II: And Here My Troubles Began, explains why:
“Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed. . . . Healthy emotions
tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and
filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot
be the ideal type of animal. . . . Away with Jewish brutalization of the people!
Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!”
– newspaper article, Pomerania, Germany, mid-1930s (3)

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In representing Jews as mice that are distinctly not as cute and animated as Mickey
Mouse, the gritty depiction forces readers of the graphic novel to recognize that Jews are
not mice. They are human beings that are individuals just like anyone else. At the same
time, the depiction also references the legacy of Nazism on Jewish history – the Jews
could be conceived of as mice during the Holocaust because of the highly problematic
mapping of Jews onto the space outside of humanity. The Jews, in being relegated to a
place outside of humanity, foreshadow the modern-day refugee and his peripheral status
in his persecution and displacement.
The Jew’s citizenship was ineffectual and his right to life eventually consumed in
an atmosphere of nationalist fervor. These Jews were subjected to violent relocation and
genocide, even though they had “committed no acts and most of [them] never dreamt of
having any radical opinion” (Arendt, “We” 110). In their innocence, the Jewish people
fled their inhospitable homes to all parts of the world, crossing many international and
national borders. Far evolved from the early refugee described above, these Jews are not
criminals and they do not oppose the dominant religious order of their home countries.
They are born into the wrong place at the wrong time and – forcibly displaced, innocent,
and persecuted – have become the model of the modern-refugee upon which
contemporary refugee policies are centered.
In the emergent world order after the Second World War, countries all around the
world sat down in what was to become the United Nations (hereafter known as UN) and
its Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (hereafter shortened to Convention). In
this new era, the refugee becomes someone who have been innocently persecuted and
displaced, and who, in the process of displacement, has become a political figure that

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remarks upon a country’s conscience. After all, even though the 1951 Convention set out
a widely accepted definition of refugee and even though the 1967 Protocol has expanded
the Convention to become applicable worldwide limited only by the member countries of
the UN, this definition has since been contested and refined by international law and
individual countries time and time again. However, it is worthwhile to revisit the original
UN definitions to further understand the figure of the refugee.
The United Nations and the Modern Refugee
The UN, formed after World War II in 1945 as a group of 51 countries who were
“committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations
among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights”
(“UN at a Glance”), had the immediate problem of helping the many refugees that were
spilled over from the war. Besides the Jews, there were also the millions of forced
laborers who were brought out of their countries to work all over Germany and Nazi
Europe to fuel the war economy. Mark Spoerer and Jochen Fleischhacker, in “Forced
Laborers in Nazi Germany: Categories, Numbers, and Survivors,” note how the scale of
civilian forced labor was immensely increased in World War II, in that “[t]he German
occupants . . . lured or deported several million foreign civilians, POWs, and
concentration-camp inmates into the Reich to support the German war economy” (171).
These forced laborers were deported to Germany as a result of Nazi expansion across
Europe and the bulk of them lived and worked in harrowing circumstances. They were
kept alive only because of “the German economy’s urgent need of manpower [which]
retarded their immediate and complete destruction” (171). On the Pacific side of the war,
Japan had also forcibly amassed large numbers of Asian civilians to support the war.


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These workers were denied the option of returning home or leaving for a more hospitable
land. After the war, many of these forced laborers were unable to return to their countries
because of reasons such as “postwar antisemitism” or because their home countries were
“directly or indirectly controlled by Joseph Stalin’s USSR” (181). On the other hand,
many of these workers were no longer recognized as civil members of postwar Germany.
All these people added to the displaced and stateless numbers that emerged from the
Second World War.
The existence of Jews and forced laborers as refugees and displaced persons
resulted in the creation of the UNHCR and the Convention which includes as its primary
condition the Article stating that “the term ‘refugee’ shall apply to any person who . . .
[a]s a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951” (14) and that “the words ‘events
occurring before 1 January 1951’ . . . shall be understood to mean either: (a) ‘events
occurring in Europe before 1 January 1951’; or (b) ‘events occurring in Europe or
elsewhere before 1 January 1951’” (14-5). The subsequent Protocol removed this virtual
timestamp and extended the term “refugee” to include people displaced in events outside
of 1 January 1951. This expansion of the people the term includes only reinforces the
extent of conflict, persecution and displacement taking place worldwide in the 20th
century and beyond.
In World War II, refugee Jews who were unable to participate outwardly in civil
society in the Nazi-controlled regions of Europe as a result of anti-Semitism and the
forced laborers who had no free will sought asylum in countries such as the United States
and Switzerland. This unprecedented wave of refugees swamped the world and as a
result, the United Nations set up the UNHCR in 1950 to “help the Europeans displaced


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by [World War II]” (“History of UNHCR”). At the beginning, the UNHCR was only

meant to be a temporary unit but its presence became long-term when the United Nations
recognized the then-emerging and fast-growing numbers of refugees who were displaced
by post-World War II conflicts (“History of UNHCR”). It is out of the UNHCR that the
1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol emerged.
These two documents mark the first formal international agreement on how
refugees are to be treated. They also mark the first formal international description of the
refugee identity, however impersonal the description is. According to the introductory
note by the UNHCR, “[as of 2010], there are 147 State Parties to one or both of these
instruments” (Convention 5). These State Parties are countries from all over the world
and their endorsement of the Convention and Protocol signifies a landmark meeting point
between the international agreement and each individual country’s national policy on the
treatment of refugees. The resultant impact of such a meeting is that “refugee” is now a
status that is accorded to individuals who seek refuge in a foreign country and who agree
to become a product of international and national law.
Politically, socially, and legally, the refugee is now a figure firmly entrenched
within the international society. In doing so, however, the refugee’s right to individuality
is compromised. The refugee is a generic statistic among numbers of displaced people
around the world. In order to be recognized as a refugee, a person has to apply for
validation from the UNHCR and undergo a series of interviews to prove that he qualifies
for the category of “refugee.” This “refugee” is the figure that will be aided by member
countries of the UN. Yet, every country has different interpretations of the Convention
and Protocol and every country expects differently of its refugees.


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It is impossible to try and formulate a single type of refugee whom all nations will accept,
because refugee policies vary from nation to nation and from time to time. However, it is
possible to identify common traits (starting with the UN documents) before a country will

recognize an asylum seeker as a refugee. One notable way in which we can interpret the
refugee is how international law demands that nations offer refuge to all refugees.
Countries are asked to extend the “core principle of non-refoulement” (Convention 4) to
each refugee, in that:
Governments continue to receive refugees in their territories and that they act in
concert in a true spirit of international cooperation in order that these refugees
may find asylum and the possibility of resettlement. (Convention 11)
Non-refoulement “is understood in international law as a duty of a state not to return a
person to a place of persecution” (Boed 27). While in words this principle of nonrefoulement seems ideal, in reality, however, non-refoulement “only compels a state not
to return a person to a place where he or she would be persecuted but leaves the state free
to send him or her elsewhere” (Boed 50). In short, the principle of non-refoulement
protects the refugee from having to return to his or her inhospitable country of origin
where his or her life is under threat but does not prevent the refugee from being subjected
to the national demands the place from which he or she seeks asylum.
National governments protest against fully assimilating too many refugees into
their societies under the guise of protecting their citizens’ rights and livelihoods. Many
countries fear that an influx of refugees will cause civil unrest. National law, caught
between the nation’s social ethics of trying to uphold human rights and that same nation’s


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political self-interests of preserving its citizen’s privileges, requires that refugees first
declare themselves as people seeking asylum, before subjecting all asylum-seekers to a
process of investigation of the validity of their declaration. The result of such a process is
often controversial, as Joy Purcell notes in “A Right to Leave, but Nowhere to Go:
Reconciling an Emigrant’s Right to Leave with the Sovereign’s Right to Exclude.” She
identifies a compelling case study which reveals how the internationally accepted
Convention and Protocol, alongside similar international documents, fall short of

addressing the refugee problem worldwide:
[W]hile asylum applicants fleeing [persecution] may gain the sympathy of the
United States, they will not gain admission. Rather, individuals seeking to
emigrate in order to find a better life are labeled “economic migrants” and quickly
denied refugee status. Therefore, the millions living in countries stricken by
famine or civil war would not qualify as refugees under the standard used by the
majority of countries today. (199)
Simply put, asylum applicants to the United States are considered economic migrants and
not refugees, and are therefore not protected by ideals such as non-refoulement. Yet, the
United States is listed among the “[m]ajor refugee hosting countries” (Global Trends
2010 14) in the world and hosts hundreds of thousands of refugees each year. This
discrepancy between Purcell’s findings and the UNHCR statistical report bears out Jerzy
Sztucki’s examination of the political problems of individual countries apply the
Convention and Protocol intra-nationally.


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In “Who is a Refugee? The Convention Definition: Universal or Obsolete?,”
Sztucki postulates through the French representation in the Economic and Social Council
of the United Nations (ECOSOC) that “obligations flowing from the Convention were
such that the day might come when certain countries might find it impossible to honour
them” (57). The Convention and Protocol requires States who are receiving refugees to
provide these refugees with the same treatment “as is accorded to aliens generally,”
“[e]xcept where this Convention contains more favourable provisions” (Convention 17),
but countries, under the excuse of upholding their national security or ensuring the best
interests of the refugee, often do not follow suit.
Recalling Purcell’s article, the Convention and Protocol have sparked many
debates over which are the refugees who can access the rights to the protection of

refugees that are laid out in the Convention and the Protocol. The debates carry on in
Refugee Rights and Realities: Evolving International Concepts and Regimes, where
Frances Nicholson and Patrick Twomey edit a collect of papers on “the rights of refugees
and asylum seekers and the often contrasting reality of the practice of states and other
actors in this area” (1). Anny Bayefsky edits another volume titled Human Rights and
Refugees, Internally Displaced Persons and Migrant Workers, in which various authors
similarly negotiate the lack in the Convention and Protocol, the problematic application
of the UNHCR documents to a real-life context, as well as how the standards of due
process can be set out. These voices point towards one major area of consideration when
it comes to determining a usable understanding of “refugee” – despite the general
agreement that refugees flee from persecution and seek help, the actual definitions of
“persecution” and “help” vary from place to place and time to time. The fluidity of the


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refugee’s silhouette is such that many countries only take in “suitable” refugees that
benefit them. The modern-day refugee is someone who, in flight from a persecuted
homeland, must be defined by the UNHCR and the respective country from which
asylum has been sought. Thus, refugees sit at the bottom of the immigrant ladder below
two other widely accepted people movement categories: the immigrant and the exile.
The Immigrant and the Exile
Set against the refugee, the immigrant can be thought of as the ideal incoming
person to the host society to fill gaps in the manpower infrastructure of the host society.
Ranging from the rich expatriate professional to the low income hard laborer, these
people migrate because of the economic opportunities open to them, out of choice.
Furthermore, their option to return home is an open one. While some may argue that the
poorer immigrants may not have the financial ability to return home, I assert that these
immigrants can undo their migration because their countries of origin have not become

inhospitable towards them. One of the trends of migration – circular migration – entails
an eventual return to the country of origin (“Circular Migration”), an option that many
immigrants keep open because they are keen to maximize both the opportunities available
to them in the host country as well as the country of origin. Thus, the immigrant is able to
access a more permanent and elevated position within the host society due to an ability to
plan for and to secure competent modes of entry into the new country.
On the other hand, refugees have no way of knowing when or whether their
countries of origin will ever become hospitable towards them. Also, should refugees
return to their homelands, they will go back to devastation because they were chased out


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of their homes with great violence and destruction. In “Refugees, Immigrants, and the
State,” Jeremy Hein distinguishes between “planned migration by immigrants and
spontaneous flight by the refugees” (55), because refugees do not have a choice about
and cannot plan their travel patterns. They flee at an instant, without knowing where they
will end up at. Unlike the immigrant, the refugee is someone who is taken because of his
or her pathetic situation and is more often than not told to be grateful for the charity that
is being extended to him or her.
Unlike the immigrant, exiles are also pushed out of their homelands to seek a
dwelling place elsewhere. However, exiles and refugees are vastly different in that:
Exile originated in the age-old practice of banishment. Once banished, the exile
lives an anomalous and miserable life, with the stigma of being an outsider.
Refugees, on the other hand, are a creation of the twentieth-century state. The
word “refugee” has become a political one, suggesting large herds of innocent and
bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance, whereas “exile carries
with it, [Said thinks], a touch of solitude and spirituality.” (Said, “Reflections,”
181)

Said’s remarks raise crucial contradistinctions between a refugee and an exile. Firstly, he
asserts that a refugee is a twentieth-century construct while an exile dates much further
back in history, because an exile is barred from return by a formal act of expulsion
whereas refugees are driven out suddenly in massive droves. Secondly, he asserts that the
refugee is a construct void of the solitude and spirituality of an exile. Said’s second
assertion has been earlier examined to some extent, in that refugees are a political


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construct (as a result of the Convention and Protocol) that is a part of the international
community, a construct that is modulated by international and national law. These
refugees are created by the need to deal with the overflow of displaced persons after
World War II and are not considered individuals with rights beyond those of a refugee.
The exile writer, on the other hand, translates his or her experiences to share with the rest
of the world and is marked by a restlessness from the need to be continually on the run in
“a life permanently ‘out of place,’ suspended in perpetual exile” (Zeleza 3), far unlike the
refugee whose right to speak as an individual is compromised by his or her acquiescence
to being considered a figure of overflow. There can be no spirituality or solitude as a
statistic of a political category.
The historical weight of the exile – the “age-old practice of banishment” (Said,
“Reflections” 181) – is what places the exile above the law. The exile may have been
banished by his or her country but he or she can relocate elsewhere. After all, a single
figure is less threatening (as a whole) than a whole population of people when it comes to
seeking asylum in a host country. Furthermore, an exile is not without his or her
followers. In the case of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, one of the most
famous exiles of the last decade, he was accused of rampant corruption and was ousted in
a military coup in 2006. Since then, he has relocated to Dubai. However, Thaksin still has
a strong political base in Thailand that supports him. While Thaksin may have been

exiled from Thailand, he still has the moral superiority, the mark of “solitude and
spirituality” (Said, “Reflections” 181), to be a figure that is larger than life unto the
masses that support him. Banishment made Thaksin a more revered figure because it
validated all his actions such that he carries with him the dignity of a political figure


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whose acts of wrongdoing led to his banishment but whose all other good acts lend him
the clout and power to prevent Thai law from prosecuting him without inciting civil
unrest (Beech).
In measuring the refugee against the immigrant and the exile, we come to realize
that the modern-day refugee is marked by a beginning in the UNHCR 1951 Convention
and is a “created consistency, that regular constellation of ideas” (Said, Orientalism, 5).
This consistency is the amalgamated whole of the refugees that is represented in all
discourses regarding refugees and it is this same whole that seeks asylum and refuge each
time a refugee tries to find refuge in a host country. However, we need to ask if these
discourses on refugees that we have looked at, among other legal and political definitions
of refugees, have presented an acceptable standard of who or what refugees are to the
international community. We also need to question if national standards are acceptable,
as a foundation upon which a citizen’s understanding of what a refugee is, is based.
Media
There is a revealing commentary in Spike Lee’s documentary, When the Levees
Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, which shows how the media tries to shape who refugees
are and how people repeat these mediated impressions. In the chapter, “American
Citizens,” victims from Hurricane Katrina react against being called refugees, one of
them asking if, “when Hurricane Katrina blew away [his] home, did it blow away [his]
citizenship too?” (Lee). The media position in describing these victims as refugees is a
highly controversial one, a position deftly examined by Adeline Masquelier in “Why

Katrina’s Victims Aren’t Refugees: Musings on a “Dirty” Word.” She argues that “[t]he


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discomfort that so many people in the United States reportedly felt at hearing (or reading
about) fellow U.S. citizens being called “refugees” was revealing of their self-image”
(736). Masquelier adds that the image that is under threat by labeling Americans as
refugees is an image of “power, prosperity, and self-sufficiency,” “testimony to the
vitality of the ‘American dream’” (736). In creating this image of despair in which the
American dream came “under threat” (736), the media was pointing to the lack of aid and
the slowness of response to the victims; however, the victims themselves, repeating an
instilled understanding of refugees as foreign, without government and not from
America, balked against such a label. Many of these voices who wish to shape an
individual’s conception of “refugee” lie in the public domain of the mass media.
Television news channels broadcast images of broken African and Middle Eastern
people huddled in desert camps, of Angelina Jolie in a patterned headscarf and her brood
of international children, of individuals seeking members of their families who were left
behind. Newspapers report on war-torn countries whose citizens have left in massive
droves, on illegal immigrants who sneak across borders, on voluntary repatriation. Far
from being flippant, what I am trying to show here is how newspapers and television
broadcasts (and even radio, though to a lesser extent) contribute to our understanding of
what a refugee is. These images appeal to the receiver’s compassion and emotion and this
pathetic figure of the refugee is usually what gets perpetuated alongside the national and
international policies on sympathetic treatment of the refugee. Jerzy Sztucki asserts, quite
rightly, that: