Top Quotes: “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives” — Viet Thanh Nguyen
Introduction
“I believe in my human kinship to Syrian refugees and to those 65.6 million people that the United Nations classifies as displaced people. Of these, 40.3 million are internally displaced people, forced to move within their own countries; 22.5 million are refugees fleeing unrest in their countries; 2.8 million are asylum seekers. If these 65.6 million people were their own country, their nation would be the twenty-first largest in the world, smaller than Thailand but bigger than France.”
“We should remember that justice is not the same as law. Many laws say that borders are sacrosanct, and that crossing borders without permission is a crime. Unpermitted migrants are thus criminals and the refugee camp is a kind of prison. But if borders are legal, are they also just? Our notions of borders have shifted over the centuries, just as our notions of justice and humanity have.
Today we can usually move freely between cities within a country, even if those cities were once their own entities with their own borders and had fought wars with each other. Now we look back on those times of city-states — if we remember them-and I doubt few of us would want to return to such a condition.
Likewise, we should look at our current condition of national borders and we should imagine a more just world where these borders would be markers of culture and identity, valuable but easily crossed, rather than legal borders designed to keep our national identities rigid and ready for conflict and war, separating us from others. The dissolution of borders is the utopian vision of cosmopolitanism, of global peace and of a global place where no one is displaced, of humanity as a global community that is allowed its cultural differences but not the kind of differences that lead us to exploit, punish, or kill. Making borders permeable, we bring ourselves closer to others, and others closer to us. I find such a prospect exhilarating, but some find this proximity unimaginably terrifying.”
“When it came time to enroll me in school, my father made a choice that short-circuited my unrest, at least for a time. As we stood there at the registrar’s counter, he very casually, and without so much as turning to me, registered me as Joseph Azam. To this day I don’t know what went into his decision. Perhaps he and my mother had noticed my mushrooming anxiety, and, perhaps they realized it had something to do with how I thought I was going to fare in this new place. In any case, my father’s decision liberated me from the immigrant self-gaze that had consumed me for so long, but it also felt like a death.
So much of what I had been through with my parents over the years — Kabul, India, Germany, our early days in New York — seemed to fall instantly out of focus as the name Yousuf faded. Being known as Joseph or Joe outside of my family brought with it the ordinariness and anonymity that I had so desperately wanted at age six, but at fifteen it brought me discomfort and waves of guilt at home.
I wondered what went through my parents’ heads when they’d call me down for dinner by a new name or if my young sisters, who quickly took to calling me Joe, would eventually forget the name they had called me when they first learned to speak. I wondered whether it stung my parents that on top of the many things they lost and left behind in Kabul, a decade and a half later they felt compelled to surrender my name as well.”
“I picked up my passport application and I picked up my pen.
What I did next is simply what felt most honest. Instead of choosing between my names, I chose all of them.
Joseph Mohammad Yousuf Azam. It was disjointed, redundant perhaps, but it made whole again the hopes of my grandfather and added to them my own. It didn’t fit in the space provided on the form that day but it fit the moment and it fit me.
This was my American name.”
“In the summer of 1941, when my father was almost six years old, about the same age I was when we left Riga, he, along with his parents and two sisters, boarded one.of the last trains out of Daugavpils. At one point along the journey, they were attacked by a German plane and a piece of shrapnel sliced his father’s boot but, miraculously, not his foot. For four years, his family lived deep inside Russia, a time characterized by constant hunger. It stayed with him for the rest of his life. If food was ever left out, he ate it. I sometimes came into the kitchen to find him eating butter.”
“Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles is already using VR as a “pharmacy,” Sophie Hackford, a London-based futurist, says, transporting patients to relaxing and soothing environments before traumatic surgery. With a headset and a pair of headphones, burn victims in excruciating pain are clicked into cold locations and just the imagination, the virtual imagery of snow and ice, has been found to release them from the physical confines of their pain 60 percent more efficiently than morphine. The world of VR is now so sophisticated that it has the power to trick our brain into believing that what we watch through our headsets is real — even though we know, intellectually and emotionally — that we are just spectators in a beautiful, elaborate show.”
“If you were to go to São Paulo or Caracas or Quito, if you were to try to shop for this assortment of staples or delicacies in San José or La Paz or Bogota, if you were to ask in any major or minor city of Latin America where you might be able to pick your way through such a plethora of culinary choices in one location, you would be told that a place like that does not exist anywhere in that country. There is no shop in Rio de Janeiro, for instance, that next to an array of carioca fare would allow you to select among eighteen multiplicities of chile peppers or buy Tampico punch or sample some casabe bread.
That is what is most fascinating about this grocery store sporting the name COMPARE — a name which cleverly works in Spanish and English and Portuguese — but the cleverness also reveals and revels in the fact that prices here are better than elsewhere.”
“With the exception of those born in refugee camps, every refugee used to have a life. It doesn’t matter whether you were a physician in Bosnia or a goat herder in the Congo: what matters is that a thousand little anchors once moored you to the world. Becoming a refugee means watching as those anchors are severed, one by one, until at last you’re floating outside of society, an untethered phantom in need of a new life.”
“Bosnians are one of the many refugee nations: Roughly one quarter of the country’s pre-war population is now displaced, scattered all over the globe. There is no Bosnian without a family member living elsewhere, which is to say that displacement would be essential to the national character if such a thing actually existed.”
“On becoming a U.S. citizen in 2005, Kemal merged his first name with his dead brother’s so they can always be together, his legal name now Kemalemir Preston Frashto.”
“In 2000, Kemal visited Foca for the first time after the war and for the last time before going to America. His former neighbors, the mother and sister of the Serb neighbor who protected his family at the beginning of it all, insisted he stop by for lunch, as they might never see each other again. When he stepped into the house, he recognized much of his family furniture: cabinets, armoires, tables. The plates the lunch was served on also used to belong to the Frastos. “How come you have all this?” he asked the mother, if rhetorically. He knew that, after his family fled, the neighbors took furniture and other household items, claiming that if they hadn’t, someone else would have taken them. During the lunch, Kemalemir had to swallow his hurt and anger, because, he says, his mother always taught him to be the better person. But on the way out the sister, no doubt feeling guilty, said to her mother: “Give him something that belonged to them, as a souvenir,” and the mother gave him the crocheted tablecloth. In Charlotte, Kemalemir showed me the circular area where his mother had used white thread when she’d run out of the beige kind. The shift in the color was so subtle I would’ve never noticed if he hadn’t pointed it out it to me. “This thing, this small thing,” he said, “is what makes it unique.””
“Stripped of agency from the moment she fled that homeland and dependent now on those who can protect her, she is frequently seen as childish, no matter how old she actually is. As a result, she’s pitied for what she has suffered, whether real or imagined on the part of those pitying her, and the pity will diminish the heroism of her journey and all the choices she made to survive and complete it. At the same time, as is inevitable in the act of compassion, that same pity can become a form of undue respect and admiration. People will listen to her story and sigh, offering her an exemption from judgment she might not want or deserve at all.”
“When venturing into the Joburg City Center, I would take care to wear a shirt whose sleeves covered my smallpox and BCG vaccine scars on the right side of my arm, as this was another easy way in which we Zimbabweans were targeted by the police, and subsequently stopped and asked to produce identification, and possibly searched. This practice is reminiscent of the pass laws that were prevalent during apartheid, when Africans could be stopped by the apartheid police and asked to produce their “pass,” documents that showed they had a right to be where they were.”
“The mother of my childhood was a professional, self-sustaining woman. She had been a mathematics teacher at Northlea High for as long as I could remember, and was loved and respected at her school. She wore her hair in a shiny perm, loved jewelry, and had a rack of expensive shoes. She had legs for days. She loved to dance, my mother did, and would often throw parties at our house. Having grown up in Lupane Village and acquired her education at a mission school, she had reinvented herself as a city woman — vivacious, fiercely independent, and possessing a zest for life.
The Bulawayo of Queues broke Mother, a little. Or maybe a lot. I could see the stress of a year, two, three, four, and then eight of the mayhem in our country, which we foolishly believed to be temporary, taking its toll. She was no longer as lively. She spent most of her time worrying. The energy she once spent loving life was now spent surviving it. The government no longer paid its civil servants, and when it did, hyperinflation was such that the whole of her monthly salary, at one point, could only buy two kilograms of chicken. She had to resort to the gritty work of entrepreneurialism: buying and selling things, trying to make a profit wherever she could, asking for donations from her sisters who had fled to the UK and Scotland. Thanks to hyperinflation, her pension became worthless — a life, a career, a future, hopes, and dreams all wiped out so very callously in the space of a few years.
Lurking so menacingly in the background of all of this were the arrests or, worse, forced disappearances of political and human rights activists, opposition party members, and civil society organizers. Very much in the foreground were the bombings of the offices of the independent newspapers, the merciless beating and jailing of any citizens who dared to come together in a political gathering, and, eventually, the beating of any citizens who dared to protest, strike, or show any form of resistance to the world Grandfather was building in his own image.
During our 2008 elections, the army generals came out on local television vowing they would never acknowledge any president other than Grandfather. Voting for the opposition was akin to voting for war, they said.”
“Just like our different Bulawayos, my younger sister probably knows a different mother than the one I grew up with. The mother I remember used to take me to the Bulawayo Drive-In to watch movies like Honey I Blew Up the Kid and on trips to Botswana to visit her swanky friends. My younger sister’s mother — our mother — has taken to a new love for church and the bible. She no longer hosts parties, has made no real effort at building meaningful friendships in Piet Retief, and, unlike her teaching days at Northlea High, finds little joy in her job. She is always dreaming of home, not the home of Grandfather’s imagining and design, but another home, probably the home our countrymen dreamed of when we attained independence from Britain in 1980.
She has gone through various displacements in her life. Perhaps that is why she is so tired. She was in her early teens when our liberation war with the colonial state of Rhodesia broke out in the 1970s, and had to go into hiding in the bush in her village. She also lived through another terrifying period of upheaval in our country, Gukurahundi, the state genocide of some twenty thousand civilians in the Matabeleland region which took place right after our independence in 1980.
She has refused to speak about this period, save for her experiences at Dukwi Refugee Camp in Botswana, where she and her siblings fled to during the time of the genocide.”
