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 i   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 ii   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 iii   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. 1    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 2    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 3    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. 4    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. 5    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 6    “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 7    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.”).  8    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) 9    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 10    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. 11    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 12    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. 13    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 14    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. 15    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 16    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 17    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 18    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 19    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 20    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: 21    Formally, the determination of refugee status is declaratory, not constitutive, in character: a person does not become a refugee as a consequence of recognition, but is recognised because he or she is a refugee . . . (70-1) People who are persecuted have to go through many stages of interviews and applications in order to be recognized as a refugee and relocated to a safer place to live. In the process of seeking asylum, refugees lose their rights as individuals and become statistics whose immediate needs are basic healthcare, food and shelter. As viewers of the moving image and readers of print, we very seldom get to interact directly with a refugee without encountering the many intermediate layers that filter our conception of what a refugee is. Beyond these digital and print representations of a refugee, the few who get to interact personally with refugees are moderated by human rights institutions such as peacekeepers, humanitarian aid workers and even social workers. By the time refugees are accepted into a host country to live, they have already been configured by these multiple layers of perception. Bearing in mind the constructed-ness of the refugee – without discounting the horrific experiences and vast sufferings the refugee has undergone and likely still faces – we come to realize that our knowledge of the refugee is impacted by these preconceived notions of these people fleeing persecution and their histories, policies and philosophies. Who is the Refugee? Who is really a refugee? International law is watered down, modified, and at times violated by individual nations in their deliberate recognition of a select type of refugee that fits in with their internal ideals, while national law and policies become tools 22    for the execution of segregating “good” refugees from “bad ones.” Also, we see how a refugee, unlike an immigrant or an exile, is unable to represent himself or herself once he or she seeks asylum, because the host nation or receiving body needs to determine if he or she poses a threat to (national) security and whether the claim to refugee status is a legitimate one. The mass media then adds to the shaping of refugees in the public sphere, figuring the refugee for a specific report or purpose. In the midst of so much noise, the figure of the refugee is a very quiet, pathetic one, because the refugee individual is lost against the legal, political, and media representations. Returning to Arendt, she suggests that we can find out the refugee “identity” if we listen to “the “truth” that refugees tell” (“We” 119). I will like to suggest that it is in the realm of literary fiction that we can find such truth, away from the factual demands of political, social, academic, and legal documents and their claims to authenticity and accuracy. The next chapter will begin with a section on the difficulties of representation in refugee literature. Then, there will be a close examination of two types of writings on refugees: UNHCR documents produced to raise awareness about UNHCR activities and a novel, What is the What. These case studies will explore the various strategies of fictionality that are employed in the works of fiction to suggest that the refugee identity is greatly enriched by retellings through the framework of fiction. Chapter 3: What is Refugee Literature? Listening to the Refugee Speak: Difficulties of Representation All kinds of refugee works have permeated the English-reading public. As these next examples show, there is an increasing amount of refugee literature and other works 23    of fiction which are all produced in this past decade. Such literature reaches out to a wide range of audiences and indicates the extent to which refugee issues have filtered into our everyday lives. One type of literature – literature produced by the UNHCR – attempts to educate the public on refugee issues. In 2007, the Public Affairs department of the UNHCR published and freely distributed a thin booklet on Refugee Children: Escape from Persecution and War (hereafter shortened to Refugee Children 2007). The booklet, brightly colored and informally decorated with pictures of little clay figures and handwritten typescript, caught the attention of educators and school-going children. Refugee Children 2007 is the third installment; in 2000, the UNHCR had previously released Refugee Children: Escape from Persecution and War (hereafter shortened to Refugee Children 2000) and in 1999, Refugee Teenagers: Escape from Persecution and War (hereafter shortened to Refugee Teenagers). Refugee Teenagers (Talbot) enjoyed a reprint in 2001. Besides these booklets, Lesson Modules on refugee experiences have also been created and published on the UNHCR website. Both the booklets and the Lesson Modules are for teachers to use in classrooms and lectures to promote the work of the UNHCR. In 2006, David Eggers published a novel, What is the What: A Novel, which, on the inside cover, contradictorily claims to be “The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng.” Eggers collaborated with Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese Lost Boy who eventually escaped to America to tell a fictionalized version of his life story in this novel. The book draws attention to the plight of these Lost Boys who have relocated to the United States and one result of the book is the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation (hereafter shortened to VAD Foundation), which aims to “[help] members of the southern 24    Sudanese diaspora in the United States,” “[rebuild] southern Sudanese communities,” and “[improve] U.S. policy toward Sudan” (“Mission Statement”). The latter part of this essay will examine this work in detail as a work of refugee literature, but, suffice to say for the moment, it is yet another example of refugee literature that has permeated public consciousness. There are many other such examples, including Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, Katherine Paterson’s The Day of the Pelican, Mary Williams’s Brothers in Hope: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, and Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s I, Rigoberta Menchú, An Indian Woman in Guatemala. The audiences that these different works of literature reach point towards a burgeoning awareness of the widespread problem of refugees worldwide. From the widely televised collapse of the New York Twin Towers which sparked off the war on terror to the newspaper reports on the outpouring of refugees from civil wars in Africa and Afghanistan to the books, films, and reports made about these events, we are not allowed to forget that refugees exist. Despite the variety of examples given above and the different people that they reach out to, they all share in common the focus on representing refugee experiences. They deliberately seek out the refugee and attempt, to varying abilities, to communicate the refugee experience to their intended audience. All of the examples, with their focus on refugee experiences, revolve around the figure of the refugee, a figure that occupies the peripheries of fiction and representation elsewhere in other literature. 25    The importance of understanding the refugee experience cannot be overemphasized. We live in a world where refugee numbers are increasing constantly. A direct consequence is that many refugees live in refugee camps or are relocated to new countries and live in new communities. The UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2009 reports that the total number of refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced persons has increased from 42 million to 43.3 million from 2008 to 2009 and that these numbers do not include people who have been displaced by natural disasters (10). The discourses that form around the refugee can be divided into the two main areas of refugee relief and refugee studies and are heavily influenced by national policies, the UNHCR, and the news media. As a result, what we know about the refugee is statistical and sociopolitical, through the information provided by social workers, relief agencies, politicians, and policymakers in the form of reports, demographic data and policies. Articles such as Joy Purcell’s “A Right to Leave, but Nowhere to Go: Reconciling an Emigrant’s Right to Leave with the Sovereign’s Right to Exclude” and Liisa Malkki’s “Refugees and Exile: From Refugee Studies” to the National Order of Things” examine the figure of the refugee against international and national policies and practices to consider the anthropological implications of displacement that refugees undergo. Carol Mortland’s “Transforming Refugees in Refugee Camps” and Harold Koh’s “Who are the Archetypal “Good Aliens?” look at the status of a refugee when he exits from a refugee camp into a host society. “A Mixed Methods Study of Refugee Families Engaging in Multiple-Family Groups” (Steven Weine et al) is a social science study on the transitions, trauma and adjustment difficulties. From these examples, we can infer how the articles about refugees largely focus on the physical and sociopolitical needs and demands of the 26    refugee. Yet, few articles give us insight into how a refugee, as a speaking individual, might feel about his or her experience and what he or she has to say about it. When we look more closely at refugee writing and writings about refugees, we can learn more about the figure of the refugee, the refugee experience and the resultant responses to such people and their life experiences than the statistical and technical terms policies and social articles produce. In “Listen to My Picture,” Lisa Brunick observes the poetry written by a young child in her class. Though little Maja is only in grade school and is still encountering English poetry, she presents her audience with an insightful and delicate glimpse of the devastating break that refugees like her experience when they are suddenly and forcefully displaced. In her poetry, images of “little birds,” “goldfishes” and a “funny dog” (qtd. in Brunick 14; 3-5) reflect the period of innocence that was destroyed in the conflict. The images of “guns” and “sea” (qtd. in Brunick 14; 9-10) point towards the trauma that Maja experienced and the journey she undertook to her new home. More than just images to symbolize the various parts of her refugee experience, these images open a way for us to sympathize with Maja as a person who is a refugee and to understand how she continues to miss her interrupted childhood and her lost hometown. Maja finds refuge in poetry as it enables her to express her innermost feelings. Moreover, putting her experiences onto paper displaces them from her for the duration of the poem, allowing us readers, in the act of reading, to undergo these experiences for ourselves. However, Maja’s poem is only one level of refugee writing. How can we identify what constitutes refugee fiction? More often than not, refugees do not have the luxury of time and money to write stories. Many refugees who resettle in English-speaking 27    countries do not have a good command of the English language and are struggling to make ends meet. Even if the refugee experience is written and published, the stories are put to different uses. Maja’s poem is fairly untouched, because it was meant for a grade school project and nothing more. Yet, Brunick’s use of Maja’s poem in her article already shades the poem to bear more meaning that it had started out with – now, Maja’s poem is evidence in the academic discussion on how art is a tool for refugees to express themselves with. Every refugee experience is different and individual. At the same time, there are common themes such as displacement, trauma, hope, and community that run through these refugee stories. Identifying the refugee experience as a central concern of the refugee novel is only a starting point for us to begin to understand refugee fiction and how it is. However, the sooner we recognize the wealthy resources of refugee literature that exist, the sooner we will be able to understand why critical knowledge of refugee literature is crucial to our very existence of mankind and its society. In the process of representing the refugee experience, there are many difficulties in representing refugees. Benjamin Zephaniah, a British writer, wrote a poem about his experience with “a judge saying to a Roma woman from Poland that, although he did believe her story that she had been repeatedly gang-raped, he couldn’t accept her claim for asylum because rape is not a form of persecution” (qtd. in Schmid, Harris, and Sexton). Zephaniah reacts to the gross misinterpretation of persecution that led to the disjuncture between the reality articulated by the Roma woman and the legal verdict the judge handed to the woman in his poem, “Appeal Dismissed.” The poem highlights the unjust treatment the woman received from the judge: 28    You have been a victim of an act of depravity And you may never love again, Nevertheless you have only been raped And in the books that I have read Rape does not constitute torture, Not within the ordinary meaning of the word, So go home And take your exceptional circumstances with you. (“Article”; 28-35) In Zephaniah’s poem, the Roma woman is unable to represent herself in the court of law, because her request to claim asylum requires her to give up the right to represent herself. When the judge changes gang rape into something far less than the kind of torture that justifies refugee status, she is unable to counter. The judge ignores that she was raped because she is Roma and female, and refuses to grant her asylum. As a result, the Roma woman becomes just another statistic who does not fit into “the books” (“Article”; 31) and has to go back to where she will continue to undergo severe persecution. “Appeal Dismissed” brings out the often unnoticed oppression and suppression that refugees face at the hands of superior political, legal, and social figures. More importantly, the poem also highlights the lack of compassion and sympathy such formal figures like the judge bear for their fellow humankind. On the other hand, because Zephaniah chose to write about this case of mistreatment in a poem, readers are aware of the plight of the Roma woman and can sympathize with her. 29    One of the largest difficulties of representing the refugee experience arguably is the difficulty of representing from the outside. The refugee embodies all that is alien and threatening. To acknowledge a refugee and all that he represents would be to acknowledge simultaneously that the world order is leaking and that man is killing man on a larger scale than ever. It would also be to recognize that there are other human beings (just like all of us with “inalienable” human rights) who can be stripped of their so-called “inalienable” rights and rendered impotent. The anxiety the citizen faces in the presence of a refugee is perhaps the biggest motivator in the political and legal arenas to be condescendingly tolerant of the refugee without compromising the host society’s superior position. To allow the refugee to speak is to blur the lines between citizen and alien, non-persecuted and persecuted, strong and weak. Given that the refugee is a highly politicized figure, is it possible to examine the refugee in a non-political arena? We return to Maja’s poem, a poem which is very revealing in how the condition of being a refugee is not conceived of as a political or an international construct, but is seen as a historical consequence of war. From Maja’s poem, we can infer that the individual refugee is more often concerned with what is lost and gained in the process of becoming a refugee and with the ability to express such losses and gains for other people to understand, as Maja “[wishes she] remembered what [she] forgot” (qtd. in Brunick 14; 13-4). Similarly, the website, Iraqi Refugee Stories, is the project of a videojournalist, Jennifer Utz. According to the website, “[t]he idea behind Iraqi Refugee Stories emerged from an interest in creating an intimate oral history of the refugees displaced from Iraq, who currently number more than 5 million” (“About Iraqi”). This notion of a history that exists, that is not formalized 30    or officiated, furthers why it is important to examine the figure of the refugee from a position that is removed from an overtly politicized arena. Even though “[o]ne in five Iraqis is now without a permanent home, yet rarely are their voices heard” (“About”), despite Utz’s website collating these stories. In order to ensure that the refugees are able to share their experiences without being displaced by political opinions and concerns, the refugee experiences have to be shared in a realm that is neither too steeped in politics nor too far removed such that the experiences shared discount to nothing. Fiction offers the possibility of such a realm. Literary Texts: the Power to Question Doxologies The OED Online’s etymology for “literature” includes the Latin word “litterātūra ,” which refers to the “use of letters, writing, system of letters, alphabet, instruction in reading and writing, writings, scholarship,” as well as the French word “littérature,” which refers to “knowledge acquired from reading or studying books, learning, erudition” (literature, n.”). The literary segment of literature draws from these two meanings – the first meaning implies communication and expression while the second meaning implies understanding and awareness – to combine into a form that makes use of the detached transferable symbol of the letter to communicate an understanding from person to person on a particular subject. In between such a negotiation between the inscribed letter and the understanding that the reader draws from reading words on a page, there is a world of publication and circulation which work together to influence the space in which literary fictions exist. 31    To say that a refugee can completely represent himself as himself in a literary space would be to ignore the effects of publication and circulation. The editors whom the writer works with, the cover illustrations of the resultant book, the marketing managers who decide when and how to circulate copies of the book – all these factors shape the public reception of what a refugee has to say. Moreover, sometimes, the refugee is not the writer or co-writer of the literary work we call refugee literature. All the people involved in the process of creating a book filter the experience that is being communicated. However, it is important to differentiate between the individual experience that is communicated and the means through which a literary work is produced. Loosely speaking, literature includes just about anything that is in print – documents, reports, novels, poems, (auto)biographies, letters, and so on. However, an allencompassing definition of literature does not take into consideration the diverse purposes that the print material is put to. For example, reports are authorizing documents that are used to forward scientific theories or give supporting evidence. Novels and poems, though they may have been written for historical or social purposes are largely read with pleasure for leisurely purposes. Not all literature is accessible by refugees. If the political and legal aspects of a society render a refugee insignificant or nonexistent, the refugee cannot access the means to read, let alone write, political or legal literature. The refugee cannot produce a UNHCR document, because he does not have the power or access to do so. On the other hand, fiction is far less demanding and provides a broader audience that reads what is being produced. As we shall proceed to see in the next section on Wolfgang Iser’s “Fictionalizing: The Anthropological Dimension of Literary Fictions, “ 32    Iser describes fiction as “the storytelling branch of literature” (939) in which “[f]ictions … are … conditions that enable the production of worlds whose reality … is not to be doubted” (940). This powerful description, of what fiction is, is crucial to our understanding of the type of writing that the refugee can engage in. Literature that does not demand a factual accountability, that does not demand or install a referent, allows the refugee to share of his or her experiences from wherever he or she is. Though the refugee is within the camp outside of normative social structures that first world citizens instinctively understand, the refugee is still able to create fiction because literary spaces allow storytelling to take place within them. The refugee’s border experiences – from being kicked out of his home country to being held in limbo in refugee camps, from being transferred into host societies but not necessarily assimilated into the communities already present, from having undergone a refugee experience that has no equivalent in other spheres of living experiences – can evoke emotions in his readers through the act of fictionalizing, the act of crossing the border from lived reality into evocative nonreality. Even when the refugee is not the author, the literary fiction that is created is still a possibility simply because it is a work of fiction. Iser’s model of fiction allows the reader this: instead of looking for facts and weeding out the lies (as legal and political systems are wired to do so), the reader recognizes that the fictitious elements in a text all serve to evoke a reality that a reader has had no experience of and in which the lack of experience does not matter. The writer can dispense with factors that do not serve the larger narrative and “endow[his adventures with a meaning which is not inherent in them” (Iser 943). Thus, the literary space in which fictionalizing takes place allows the writer of refugee literature to shape a possible interpretation of the refugee’s story without being caught in 33    the “real” world of politics, legalities, and fact-finding reports. This also enables refugee to transgress social norms without committing a crime against society, infusing literary fictions with the power to question doxologies. Article Review: Fictionalizing Why is there a need to identify this subset of literature, “refugee literature?” Firstly, let as look Wolfgang Iser’s proposal, in “Fictionalizing: The Anthropological Dimension of Literary Fictions,” that the very nature of fiction allows for the “linking [of] beginning and end together in order to create one last possibility through which the end, even if it cannot be overstepped, may at least be illusively postponed” (954). With an understanding of Iser’s schematic, I will then define two crucial notions – “literary fiction” and “refugee literature” – that underline the difference between reports of the refugee experience and literary representations of refugee experiences. Iser opens his paper with the observation that fiction, though often associated with “the storytelling branch of literature,” is also “what Dr. Johnson called “a falsehood; a lye.” (939). This duality of natures within the act of communication, whether of a work of literature or of a matter of intent, arises from one same process – overstepping, which he defines as the process where “the lie oversteps the truth, and the literary work oversteps the real world which it incorporates” (939). For Iser, overstepping takes place when fictions “talk of that which does not exist, even though they present its nonreality as if it did exist” (939). Moreover, Iser develops his argument based on Sir Philip Sidney’s observation that poets do not lie because they do not affirm (939). Iser argues that for literary fictions, unlike lies, the process of overstepping “incorporate[s] an identifiable 34    reality, subjected to an unforeseeable refashioning” (939) and thus presents both its reality and nonreality alongside each other to its audience. Iser calls this process of overstepping, which takes place in literary fiction, “fictionalizing” (939). Iser then spends the rest of his essay discussing fictionalizing as “a means of actualizing the possible in order to address the question why human beings, in spite of their awareness that literature is make-believe, seem to stand in need of fictions” (93940). We will continue to study Iser’s paper, but we must bear in mind a question that develops upon Iser’s thesis: why should human beings be aware of and stand in need of refugee fictions? However, let us first take a detailed look at the process of fictionalizing. Iser argues that “[f]ictions are, rather, conditions that enable the production of worlds whose reality, in turn, is not to be doubted” (940). Each and every one of these worlds is a reality that is imagined and a possibility that is explored. These worlds of nonreality that are imagined and explored are not ungrounded falsehoods. Instead, fiction is tethered to human lives and interactions through its “functions, that is, the manifestations of its use and the products resulting from it” (941). Because fiction is defined through its functions, Iser questions “what they appear to be like, what they achieve, and what they reveal in literature” (941). He turns to pastoral poetry for an example. For Iser, there is in pastoral romance “two radically different worlds [which] are telescoped: the artificial and the sociopolitical [and] these two diverging realities can be gauged from the fact that there is a sharp dividing line between them” (941). In order for either reality to be breached, characters must be “doubled” (941) through the use of disguises. As Iser points out, “[t]he shepherds do not 35    represent the rustic life of the country, but are only the trappings for staging something whose reference is no longer given and therefore has to be conceived” (942). This lack of reference in the world of the artificial and the need to breach the world of the sociopolitical in order to have meaning gives rise to what fiction is: fiction “brings about a simultaneity of what is mutually exclusive” (941). At the same time, the sociopolitical must intrude into the world of the artificial within the realm of fiction in order for the “sharp dividing line” (941) to be crossed because “all references are bracketed and only serve as guidelines for what is to be imagined” (942). In short, the sociopolitical reality is an equally imagined one as that of the artificial. The simultaneity shared between the artificial and the sociopolitical worlds enables “manifest meaning [to be] released from what it designates” and “what is said and what is meant can be differently correlated” (944). In short, “a play space opens up between the manifest and latent meaning” such that this “structure of double meaning [becomes] a matrix for generating meaning [through] simultaneous concealment and revelation” (944-5). For Iser, the power of such a play space that exists within literary fictions is that “fictionalizing epitomizes a condition otherwise unattainable in the ways in which normal life takes its course” (945). To this end, fictionalizing – that process of creating literary fictions – enables. In the process of creating fictions, we human beings are not present because we are not the characters we create. These characters are freed from the frames of reference that human beings exist within. They are, instead, the “constant enactment of selffashioning [which] never encounters any restrictions” (948-9). The characters created represent limitless extensions of ourselves in the nonreality of fiction. Iser calls the world 36    that is refracted – the “real” world in which we live – “a trap” (950), because of “our inability to be present to ourselves” (950). As we recognize the trap and weave ways out of it, we “[concoct] possibilities in order to do away with what resists penetration, thus linking up ineluctable beginnings and endings and thereby creating a framework within which we might learn what it means to be caught up in life” (951). Thus, we, “fictionalizing authors … and … readers of fiction” (950) alike, overstep reality into literary fictions for a space in which we can innovate, create and live out an infinite number of possibilities. The infinite number of possibilities “points to the fact that there are no means of authentication for the links provided” (951) and the power behind such a lack of authentication is that “what can be known need not be invented, and so fictions always subsidize the unknowable” (951). If fictions underscore the presence of the unknown, fictions generate hope in which there is the possibility of something more than what is presently available. Through Iser’s schematic, literary fiction encompasses all that is created in which the reality is overstepped and nonrealities are breached, in which characters continuously refract ourselves as human beings and in which the acts of overstepping and refraction reveal the unknown. For refugees, literary fictions thus open up a literary space, a play space, in which the ludic act of fictionalizing “[sets] off free play which militates against all determinations as untenable restrictions” (953-4). If all determinations are untenable, then the possibility of yet one more existence, perhaps a better one, is crucial. Refugee literature then becomes expressions of such hoped-for possibilities. 37    Hope translates, in its most primeval form, to survival, because the greatest enemy of existence/life is eradication/death. In this manner, then, the act of creating fiction is an act of survival. As Iser argues, the creator of a work of fiction imbues that work with his own meanings, creating realities for his readers to experience as mirrors of his own experiences. The story is thus able to outlive its creator and the characters that exist within it. If the story was based on a real-life event, the story outlives even its reallife referent. This survival function of literature is very apparent in witness literature, of which many refugee writings are a part of. In such writings, the refugee’s experiences, the people he or she has met and the home he or she has left are recreated in a narrative that remembers these “lost” parts of his individual history. Christine Cao quotes Kelly Oliver, in “Witnessing Trauma: Abjection and Sadomasochism in Trần Vũ’s Short Stories,” in that “[w]itnessing, understood as modes of “address” and “response,” offers a more critical way of understanding how traumatized individuals might regain a sense of subjectivity by being “speaking subjects” (76). In becoming a speaking subject, the refugee is able to speak a narrative of his situation that ensures the refugee experience will, at the very least, enter into public discourse. Of Testimonio “Testimonio,” the Spanish word for testimony, has come to point towards a literary genre of writing that arises out of a person’s testimony to take on the shape of a narrative text that presents a first-person account of his or her experiences. Often, these experiences rise above the individual account to draw attention to a larger world issue that is at stake. One of the most famous works of testimonio is I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (Menchú 1984). The novel is a recount of Menchú’s life 38    experiences surviving as an indigenous Guatemalan during her country’s civil war and its aftermath. Both Menchú’s life experiences and the human rights situation in Guatemala are enlarged through the lens of the testimonio. I, Rigoberta Menchú has been hit by controversy. In the catalogue of Singapore’s National Library Board, the author of the book is listed as Rigoberta Menchú herself while Elisabeth Burgos-Debray is listed as the person who edited and introduced the book. On Amazon, an online retailer where used and new books are sold, some copies of the book are attributed to Elizabeth Burgos-Debray. Burgos-Debray herself writes of this discrepancy in “The Story of a Testimonio” (Burgos and Austin, 1999), saying that she had to “transform the oral language that Rigoberta Menchú made from Quiché to Spanish into written language” (55) in order to be able to produce a narrative out of the series of interviews that she had conducted with Menchú. Yet, after the book was published, she was asked to “legally renounce authorship of the book” (59). Burgos-Debray identifies the main reason for such a shift in acknowledgement of authorship. Speaking from her perspective, she says: Perhaps it was my mistake: if instead of giving [the book] the name of Rigoberta Menchú I had opted for Habla una India de Guatemala, history might have treated me differently. (Burgos and Austin 61) It is because the book was crafted in the form of a testimonio that cut the writer off from her work, for, after all, Burgos-Debray is not Menchú. I am not taking sides in this controversy – I am merely pointing out the issues of authorship that lie behind every single testimonio. How can a first-person narrative be the literary work of another author? 39    The nature of testimony – articulating a witness account of an event – is the most individualistic and personal recount that can be uttered. This personal recount has now become tainted when written down on paper in the form of the literary testimonio because the capturing of the testimony on paper removes the singularity of the utterance. The testimony now becomes a literary work that can be read and reread, articulated and rearticulated anywhere and everywhere. The complexity of the speaking subject complicates the testimonio’s claim to authenticity. If the testimonio is a recount that is written down by a different author as a result of a series of interviews with the titular character on his or her real-world experiences, then the testimonio compromises its claim to authenticity because it is already lying – how can a book which claims to be the testimony of the titular character be written by someone other than the person himself? The testimonio is unable to reference that singular utterance made by the person who has been interviewed. On the other hand, it is precisely the testimonio’s bold claim that demands a reader’s attention. In “Risky Subjects: Narratives, Literary Testimonio and Legal Testimony,” Shonna Trinch defines testimonio as “narrative [that] has been defined as a marginalized person’s urgent narration of an unjust event for purposes of social change” (181) and elaborates that one type of testimonio are the texts “that are constructed as testimony by Latina women who seek legal recourse to deal with domestic violence in the United States” (180). As with every testimony, the act of testifying is a declarative act which asserts a claim that insists upon its own truth. Likewise, the testimonio asserts a claim that insists upon its own truth, drawing attention unto itself. The testimonio claims to be autobiographical because it fundamentally points readers to itself through its own 40    declaration of its claim to authenticity. In I, Rigoberta Menchú, the declaration in the title enlarges to become representative of other marginalized groups in Guatemala that were treated violently. Thus, though the book points back to itself, “itself” is no longer the book alone but the larger social cause which the testimonio champions. Often, testimonios are the result of a series of interviews and transcriptions. This is because the testimonios come from people who have been marginalized or maltreated and who have tried to overcome such obstacles to break into mainstream awareness. Because of this, many testimonios end being a work of fiction produced by a nonmarginalized person on behalf or in collaboration with the original person who lived through the described experiences. In such cases, Shonna Trinch suggests that the testimonio is a space in which the marginalized can find recourse to share their experiences without the burden of absolutely accurate and factual recreation: Though there is no story, no utterance, and certainly no essential or authentic subaltern discourses, there most definitely are narrative spaces in which a “main teller” might feel less encumbered by the elicitations, judgments, and determinations of her interlocutor than she might in others. (Trinch 199) Fiction absolves testimony of the need to swear that everything presented is utterly accurate and true. Instead, the message to be communicated takes centre stage. The “main teller” can share of his experiences with the aid of a co-author. Often, this co-author is someone from a more privileged background with access to publishing and editing channels. As was the case with Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony, Elizabeth Burgos-Debray 41    was such a person who helped “to transform the oral translation that Rigoberta Menchú made from Quiché to Spanish into written language” (Burgos and Austin 55). What do we see when we combine Iser’s theory of fictionalizing and the testimonio? The process of overstepping creates a space in which “we human beings are not present because we are not the characters we create.” Instead, the characters “are freed from the frames of reference that human beings exist within” (Iser 948). In short, the literariness of fictions enables a revision of known references; the refugee in refugee literature does not point towards a specific person but reflects a larger cause. The refugee characters become placeholder characters that can be filled with meaning depending on the person reading the text. These texts do not become any less authentic. A text that lays claim to authenticity is no longer a text that is factually accurate and genuinely written. Rather, a text that lays claim to authenticity is a text which in which the writers are honest unto themselves to be a declaration that draws attention to something more, thereby overstepping itself in its attempt to create more meaning. At this point, let us look at the kinds of fiction that claim a semblance of refugee literature and their claims to literariness and authenticity. I have chosen to look at UNHCR fictions because they, as official educational products of the UNHCR, lay a very heavy claim to authority and authenticity on the subject of refugees and their lived experiences. On the other hand, What is the What disclaims against any right to authority and authenticity. It instead presents itself as a novel-autobiography that combines the pleasure of a compelling novel with the severity of the message it wishes to highlight. 42    Chapter 4: UNHCR Fictions and their Claims to Literariness and Authenticity The UNHCR offers educational resources to educators and people who are interested in raising awareness about the plight of refugees worldwide among the youth. These resources are available online or can be requested from the UNHCR Public Affairs office. The immediate availability of these resources – majority of which are offered freeof-charge – reveal the extent to which the UNHCR sees its role in influencing and shaping the public perception of refugees. Educators who wish to raise awareness about refugees as well as students who want to find out more about refugees have a large pool of information to turn to. Through these resources, we can begin to understand how the UNHCR portrays refugees and shapes public perception of the refugee phenomenon. On the webpage introducing these resources, it is written that “[e]ducation is vital to UNHCR’s work, which is why [UNHCR] want[s] to encourage people to look at the resources we can put at your disposal” (“Educational Resources for Teachers”). This statement rings with an authority that is lent to all the resources: these are officially acceptable educational materials on who and how refugees are. However, can we take the resources at the informational value at which the UNHCR has priced them? If not, how do these resources present refugees and why is such a representation problematic? The first resource I wish to examine is a Lesson Module. The UNHCR website offers six such modules: Art, History, Geography, Civic Education, Human Rights, and Language and Literature. These modules are meant to “introduce refugee issues into the curriculum of these different subject areas” (“Lesson Modules”) and target three different 43    age groups based on the degree of learning abilities that each group has. I have identified the Lesson Module under the subject of Civic Education for 9- to 11-year-olds, “Refugee Children,” which introduces issues of refugees studies and human rights to young children so that these students can link these issues to “concepts such as justice, equality, tolerance, freedom, minority rights and the formation of community” (“Civic Education”). In short, this module claims to enable young children to consider the presence of refugees in their community and world as well as to reflect upon why they themselves are different from these refugees. Lesson Module: “Refugee Children” Each Lesson Module is guided by a unit plan which details the unit’s learning objectives, a few lessons and their resources used, as well as suggested readings. In “Refugee Children,” the unit plan focuses on the knowledge, skills, and values imparted to students, such as how students will learn “[t]o understand the abnormal and trying conditions in which refugee children live and endure,” “[t]o develop discrimination and discernment,” and “[t]o [have] respect for others through exposure to a lifestyle very different from their own” (“Unit plan for ages 9-11”). These learning objectives are conveyed in three lessons. The first lesson is built around the short story entitled “Jacob’s Story,” in which students are introduced to a Sudanese refugee child, Jacob, who flees the conflict in Sudan to end up in a Kenyan refugee camp. The teacher is encouraged to show “the photo of the Sudanese boys trekking their way to safety” (“Unit plan for ages 9-11”) which is available on the UNHCR website. The teacher can set the scene by asking 44    questions such as “What’s the longest distance you have ever, ever walked?” and “Were you wearing shoes when you walked so far?” (“Lesson plans for ages 9-11”) before reading the story. After the story is read, the students can answer questions that are printed on the accompanying Activity Sheet. The questions include fact-finding questions such as “Where did Jacob and the other boys come from?”, inference questions such as “Write down the reasons why Jacob and the other children felt that they could no longer stay in their home town, even in their home country.” and opinion-based questions such as “Jacob is a refugee child. What do you think makes him a refugee?” (“For teachers – ages 9-11”). After the first lesson, students move on to two lessons about children’s rights. They learn how to “differentiate between the things they want and the things they need”. The students will also learn about the idea that “people’s most basic needs are considered rights” (“Unit plan for ages 9-11”). These lessons will be conducted through small group activities, in which students in each group pretend to be a family caught in a war and have to decide which of their belongings to keep. As these students role-play war refugees, they have to discard their possessions over time and make decisions on which are the most valuable items to keep. Finally, the teacher is encouraged to lead the students in a discussion on the implications of the decision-making process on each group’s individual wellbeing and how their role-play experiences can be related to reallife refugee situations. Thus, these three lessons make up the Lesson Module that is offered to students aged 9 to 11. The most immediately noticeable thing about “Refugee Children” is the use of narrative to teach the young students. In the first lesson, in “Jacob’s Story” (“Jacob’s”), 45    Jacob’s narrative is deliberately portrayed as real and factual. The use of quotations for the larger part of the story suggests that there is a real person speaking and a real speech being quoted. The use of the first person in the quotation also suggests an autobiographical aspect to “Jacob’s Story,” which lends to the idea of Jacob as a real person and his story as a real experience. The reference to an earlier publication, “Refugee Children (Geneva, UNHCR, 1993)” (“Jacob’s”) suggests that the article is an excerpt from a longer, more formal document that warrants being cited, regardless of what the original source may be. These elements lend the weight of authenticity to “Jacob’s Story,” elevating it above the status of just another story about refugees. Instead, the article becomes a recount of a Sudanese refugee’s experience, a refugee – Jacob – that is real and individual. Furthermore, by having the teacher frame the students’ approach to the story through the use of questions about measurable, comparable experiences, Jacob’s experiences as a refugee in “Jacob’s Story” are linked to the reality of each student’s life. For example, when the teacher asks his or her students to consider the longest distance they have ever walked, knowing that the students, most likely, will not have experienced the epic trek that Jacob made, the students will begin to realize the immensity of the refugee’s flight is beyond any like experience that the students may think they have. As a result, the students will approach “Jacob’s Story” with a sense that the recollection they are to encounter is very important and overwhelming. With such a mindset, the matter-offact nature in which the event is recounted will have a greater impact on shaping the students’ understanding of the refugee experience. 46    “Jacob’s Story” is Jacob’s recollection of his refugee experience. The story is introduced by a third-person narrator and begins in medias res: For a long time, Jacob dreamed of living in a place where there was no fighting. One day he decided to run away from his village in southern Sudan. (“Jacob’s”) This beginning signals the ending in which Jacob will eventually reach a place where there is no fighting and that it is from this safe destination that Jacob will be able to share his story in retrospect. We need to look closely at where the beginning and ending are in “Jacob’s Story” because these locations and their natures are crucial to our understanding of how students who study “Refugee Children” perceive of where refugees come from and where they will end up. Jacob runs away from “his village in southern Sudan.” This village is described as a place where “there was fighting everywhere,” where “[t]here was no school” and where children were aimlessly “looking after the animals and playing all the time.” This wartorn village is life-threatening and inhospitable; as a result, Jacob runs away to “a place where there was no fighting.” In “Jacob’s Story,” this destination that Jacob heads for becomes the ideal safe haven that is the solution for refugees fleeing a hometown of conflict and strife. The identity of this safe haven is delayed. Firstly, the place is described as “a place where there was no war.” Then, the place materialized as “this place did not only exist in my dreams because [Jacob] had heard people in town talking about it and planning to go there.” Finally, the place is revealed as “the camp,” “[t]he place [Jacob] dreamed of.” The camp is described thus: 47    In the camp, there is food and medicine. And the sound of planes no longer frightens me because I know they are carrying food, not bombs.” (“Jacob’s”) The camp becomes the polar opposite of the village that Jacob fled from. The camp is one place that war cannot touch and in which refugees are safe. Through the delaying of the camp’s identity, the passage builds up suspense over whether the place that Jacob had heard of exists and whether Jacob would reach the place successfully as “[p]eople were dying on the road of hunger and thirst.” As the suspense builds up, people reading “Jacob’s Story” sympathize with Jacob through the description of his ordeal and come to hope that Jacob will survive. By the time the camp is unveiled as the safe haven, people who have read “Jacob’s Story” will perceive the camp as it is described – “the place [Jacob] dreamed of.” As we examine the camp as it is featured in “Jacob’s Story,” we realize that the camp is a temporary solution for refugees like Jacob. The safety of the camp is the penultimate remark in “Jacob’s Story.” Jacob’s final remarks are: But when I hear the plans I remember my father and brothers in my village and I am sad. I think the day I ran away, they forgot I loved them. I would like to go home. (“Jacob’s”) Where is home? Home is where Jacob’s “hometown in southern Sudan” is. Jacob belongs to his Sudanese village and the furthest he runs from home is across the Ethiopian border to a refugee camp. Students who read “Jacob’s Story” are encouraged to conceive of refugees as a remote group of people who have a home to return to, however bleak that image of a home is, and that their temporary sojourn to a refugee camp is only for the 48    limited duration of war. In the Activity Sheet, one of the accompanying questions asks students to consider “why Jacob and the other children felt that they could no longer stay in their home town, even in their home country” (“For teachers – ages 9-11”). As the students ponder responses to this question, they overlook the possibility that the refugees cannot return to their home country and cannot stay in the camp. At this point, Agamben’s words come to mind, in that the “temporary condition [of the refugee should] lead to either naturalization or repatriation” (Agamben 116). By highlighting Jacob’s desire to return to his hometown in Sudan, “Jacob’s Story” thrusts the refugee into a position of excess if the refugee should be accepted into a new society. The refugee’s rightful locations are his permanent hometown and the temporary camp. The distance between Jacob and readers of his story is extended, especially when the values that the Lesson Module on “Refugee Children” teaches are values of difference. For example, students are encouraged to have “respect for others through exposure to a lifestyle very different from their own” and to have “empathy by [imagining] themselves in Jacob’s situation and how they would cope with the difficulties which refugee children must face” (“Unit plan for ages 9-11”). In relegating the refugee to the camp, this short story about Jacob’s refugee experience may be to young students an introduction to who refugees are and what they undergo. However, to the rest of us, we have to wonder at how the refugee can only reach the camp of “safety” where even planes that fly by are planes symbolizing first world aid and hope. After all, such a simplistic representation of an ambiguous symbol – airplanes – in warfare is very problematic in a short story purporting to outline what the refugee experience is. 49    Another important factor of “Jacob’s Story” is that the bulk of the story focuses on Jacob’s recount of his flight from his village to the camp. We are not given much detail about life in the village before the flight, except that children in the village were idle and there was a lot of conflict. We are also not given much detail about what happens after Jacob receives the basic levels of relief aid at the camp, except that he is able to go to school and misses his family from whom he has been separated. Yet, in between these two points of time, there is a lot of detail provided about Jacob’s flight: The first day I didn’t eat. I just ran. And the first night I remembered the wild animals I had seen along the road. And I was afraid, so I climbed up a tree to sleep. But I couldn’t sleep. I thought something would come and pull me down, or that I would fall. (“Jacob’s”) From the degree of detail provided, readers can gather that the message to be communicated is that all refugee children undergo a hazardous journey. The picture that accompanies the story is a picture of a group of young Sudanese boys, who look like they are about the same age as the students the module is intended for – 9- to 11-years-old. The boys are skinny and ragged. They clutch a haphazard collection of belongings and are mostly bare-footed as they walk along. Clearly, the boys in the picture are the Sudanese refugees who fled their homes in search of a safer place. This image, the sole image recommended to accompany “Jacob’s Story,” serves to reinforce the notion of flight. While “flight” is fundamental to the notion of seeking refuge, focusing on the 50    flight that Jacob underwent avoids having to address what had happened to Jacob before his flight and, more pertinently, what happens to Jacob after he enters the camp. What is the significance of using such a text as “Jacob’s Story” in a Lesson Module on civic education entitled “Refugee Children?” The UNHCR website states that the Lesson Modules on civic education are intended for teachers to learn how “[r]efugees can be the subject of work units on human rights, nationalism, racism, immigration, persecution and war” (“Civic Education”). The story selected to start off the module posits the UNHCR as an empowering institution that “saves” the refugee and provides them with a temporary place to live until their homes are safe again. If we look at the story again, the third-person narration shifts into the first-person perspective when Jacob’s voice speaks from the second paragraph until the end of the short story. This narrative strategy – allowing Jacob’s voice to sound – allows “Jacob’s Story, and by extension the Lesson Module, to claim referential truth because Jacob is referenced and is an individual that has become representative of who refugee children are. In short, the UNHCR outline of the refugee boy in “Jacob’s Story” forms the definitive understanding of who refugee children are, because, if Jacob had not reached the UNHCR camp to be helped and schooled, there would be no story to be had. The second and third lessons in “Refugee Children” “are designed to help students differentiate between the things they want and the things they need” (“Unit plan for ages 9-11”). Through a series of activities, the students experience the stress of difficult decision-making that Jacob underwent when he decided to flee his home in southern Sudan. While these lessons help to increase the students’ understanding of who refugees are (in this case, refugee children), they fall short of creating a wholesome 51    understanding of the refugee experience because the students can only refer back to Jacob’s account of how he fled his war-torn village to a UNHCR camp. Also, while Jacob shares his memories of his experience, if a reader is to only experience “Jacob’s Story” and other formal accounts of the refugee experience, he or she is then restricted to one type of narrative on the refugee experience. Furthermore, such narratives on the refugee experience may be inaccurate as they are often subjected to institutional frameworks. Lesson Module: “The Depiction of Refugee Experience in Literature” Based on the previous example of a Lesson Module, one may argue that the lesson was simplified because of the young ages of the students. To balance out our critical analysis of such institutional representations of refugees as the UNHCR documents, I will like to examine a Lesson Module targeted at older children aged 15 to 18, “The Depiction of Refugee Experience in Literature.” For this module, the lesson plan includes the unit objectives and three lessons. The main objective of the module is to help students gain an understanding of the “refugees’ sense of alienation” (“Unit plan for ages 15-18”) through readings of prose and poetry. The first lesson discusses Bertolt Brecht’s poem, “Concerning the Label Emigrant,” which is found in Refugees: An Anthology of Poems and Songs. The second lesson discusses Misganaw Worknehe’s short story, “All tomorrows are the same,” from Tilting Cages: An Anthology of Refugee Writings (“Unit plan for ages 15-18”). These two works are written by refugees and are indirectly called refugee literature because they are drawn from anthologies of refugee writings and poetry. During the in-class discussion, 52    there are discussion questions for the students to respond to. Also, there are comprehension questions that the teacher can get the students to address either verbally or in a written form. The last element of the first two lessons is library research – at the end of the first lesson, students are given a task to go to the library and complete. The teacher will then spend some time during the second lesson to discuss what was uncovered during their library research. The final lesson in this module is a session on critical analysis, during which students are to “examine short passages closely, providing an opportunity for them to polish their own writing skills.” During this lesson, students consider the role of literature as “vehicles” of communication and expression. The students have to analyze the efficacy of Bertolt’s and Worknehe’s writing (“Lesson 1: “Concerning”). Bertolt’s poem, “Concerning the Label Emigrant,” is a poem about refugees who were forced to flee their homeland. Once again, this longing for a home lost unwillingly runs throughout the poem, in a similar tone to Jacob’s longing for his family and his village. In the poem, the speaker says that “Restlessly we wait thus, as near as we can to the frontier/ Awaiting the day of return, every smallest alteration/ Observing beyond the boundary, zealously asking/ Every arrival, forgetting nothing and giving up nothing” (“Lesson 1: “Concerning” 8-11). The restlessness to return to the homeland arises out of more than a longing for a place lost; it also arises out of a lack of belonging to the new place in which the refugees are staying. The camp, from where the speaker speaks, is “[n]ot a home, but an exile” (7). In the closing lines of the poem, the speaker muses upon the temporality of the camp: But none of us 53    Will stay here. The final word Is yet unspoken. (19-21) He knows that none of the refugees should stay forever in the camp, that repatriation or emigration is necessary. However, the harsh reality of life is such that refugees stay indefinitely in the camp. Carlos E. Sluzki writes of this stark reality in his article, “Short Term Heaven, Long Term Limbo: A visit to a UNHCR camp in Rwanda.” Sluzki writes that “millions of people escaped their countries – saving their own lives and that of their children – and obtained harbor in refugee camps organized for a short term stay … while remaining there for years, without any other place to go. Thus, refugee camps conceived and designed as short-term solutions become in many cases de facto long-term provisional cities, but never designed for that purpose”. With such a non-existent future facing many of the refugees, the speaker’s observation of how “[t]he final word/ Is yet unspoken” suggests that the camp is not the solution. Yet, with his homeland still at war, will the speaker be able to return to his place of origin? If not, where can he go? Both “Concerning the Label Emigrant” and “Jacob’s Story” highlight the refugee’s desire to return home. The speaker in the poem and Jacob in the short story speak of their losses and the non-permanent nature of their stay in refugee camps. However, the reality is such that a significant number of refugees are resettled into host countries. The absolute lack of reference to this large group of refugees is troubling – could it be the case that resettlement is the least favorable option and therefore the least referenced one? At the same time, if the aim of educating students about refugees is to raise awareness and increase sensitivity to the refugee situation in the world, it would 54    seem most likely that students should be sensitized to refugees and refugee communities in their midst first. However, this does not seem to be the case. The other literary text that is addressed in this Lesson Module is Misganaw Worknehe’s “All tomorrows are the same” (“Misganaw”). This short story tells of a single refugee, Mesfin, and of his life in a refugee camp. The story opens with a description of the remote and dusty desert in which the Kakuma refugee camp is set. Then, readers are introduced to Mesfin through a description of his house, “a lone plastic make-shift hut” that is located “[a]t the far end of the refugee camp.” Finally, we meet Mesfin, whose life is defined by basic activities necessary for survival. The most important thing that feeds him is his successful search for firewood, to the extent that he walked “about twenty kilometers to fetch twigs” because “having a piece of wood is the difference between eating and going without food.” This all-important bundle of firewood becomes the main focus of the story. The narrator recalls a significant event in Mesfin’s past, when he was severely beaten up by a local Turkana aggressor. As the story progresses, the tension between Mesfin, an Ethiopian refugee, and the local Turkana people is highlighted. At the end of the story, there is no resolution between Mesfin and the Turkana or any development in Mesfin’s life. “All tomorrows are the same” presents a picture of abject despair, because Mesfin does not have any hope for this future. Even when he “pray[s] for his deliverance,” the act of praying seems to be out of habit, because Mesfin knows that “God is unfair in his treatment of individuals.” This lack of hope plays out in the last line, which eradicates all promise of a better tomorrow, because “[t]omorrow is just another miserable day” (“Misganaw”). Students are asked to evaluate Mesfin’s emotional state of being and to 55    consider the reasons why Mesfin, despite having reached the relative safety of Kakuma refugee camp, does not see a viable future for himself. What, then, are the reasons that the story offers for Mesfin’s state of mind? Firstly, his physical condition is such that he is poverty-stricken, bordering on starvation, and lonely. His physical condition is caused by memories of his flights from conflict because he was “[b]orn to run away as a rabbit at the first sight of a problem” (“Misganaw”). Another reason is the place that he ended up in – Kakuma camp – where not only are the living conditions terrible, the local area of Turkana in which Kakuma is located comprises “uncompromising local Turkana people.” He sits alone in his hut with his despairing memories, recalling “how many friends perished and how many went mad and disappeared into the desert, left to unknown fates.” Given these reasons for Mesfin’s state of mind, it appears that Mesfin is right to retreat into a shell of self-pity and desolation, where he blames God for the unfair distribution of fate and tolerates everyone else around him. Mesfin’s story may seem typical of a refugee who has undergone great horrors and who has had his basic rights violated greatly, but the manner in which things and other characters are portrayed in “All tomorrows are the same” needs to be considered carefully. The firewood is a symbol of survival. Without firewood, Mesfin will not be able to cook his food to eat. It is through Mesfin’s desperate search for firewood that we learn of his relationship with other people within and without the camp: Buying charcoal is out of the question since money is hard to come across; collecting from around the camp is illegal and it would invite confrontation with 56    the uncompromising local Turkana people. So, to cook and eat a decent meal, [Mesfin] has to rise with the sun and go in search of firewood. (“Misganaw”) In the overcrowded Kakuma camp, it seems that no one shares firewood. Gathering firewood is an individual process that is fraught with obstacles. Survival, impossible without firewood, is equally individual. It is every man for himself. As the story unfolds, we learn of how Mesfin loses his firewood when he is waylaid by an aggressive “Turkana armed with knives and arrows” and has to abandon the wood to escape, “moving as a corpse, cursing the star under which he had been born” (“Misganaw”). Yet, Mesfin does not die. His need for firewood to survive is not absolute – the result of his escape proves that he can live, until the next day at the very least, to find another bundle of wood. As the story goes, we find out that Mesfin’s troubles are largely due to the manner in which local Turkana treat him because of his refugee status. The Turkana are described as “uncompromising.” The sole Turkana we meet in the course of the story is an aggressor who “threatened Mesfin with armaments” and who robbed Mesfin of his precious bundle of wood. This act of aggression reduces Mesfin to a wreck, because crying was “all he could do to keep himself from self-destruction” (“Misganaw”). Much as we are led to dislike this Turkana – and by extension, all the other “uncompromising local Turkana people” – we must wonder if the local population among which the refugee lives is as hostile as the manner in which they have been portrayed. Firstly, one person is not example enough for a conclusion as sweeping as how all the Turkana do not sympathize with the refugees. Secondly, this tenuous link between a single example and a community-wide generalization is reinforced by one of the accompanying discussion questions, in that students are encouraged to wonder if they would consider Mesfin’s 57    description of the host community too harsh. They are asked, “Would you consider [this description of the Turkana] to be too harsh a description, especially after reading about the incident between Mesfin and a Turkana man over a bundle of wood” (“Lesson 2: All tomorrows”). In asking students to judge Mesfin’s impression of the Turkana, students are also asked to judge the moral right and wrong of the Turkana’s actions. This is a problematic request because there is the danger that students will judge the entire Turkana community based on one Turkana’s actions, or, more seriously, based on Mesfin’s interpretation of one Turkana’s attitude. After all, we must not forget that Mesfin is depressed and in a fragile state of mind, thereby undermining the strength of his thoughts. To elaborate further on the precarious position that students are in when discussing the questions provided in this Lesson Module, we must look at the question that comes after the one just discussed. The next discussion question is actually a set of three sub-questions, the last of which asks students to “describe the predicament of the Turkana people” (“Lesson 2: All tomorrows”). From “a Turkana” to “the Turkana people,” students are encouraged to extend Mesfin’s judgment and their impressions of one Turkana onto a whole community of people, simply by association. In the fourth paragraph of the short story, the opening lines illuminate the depth of self-pity that Mesfin has and what we, as readers of the story, should realize of Mesfin’s recount. The lines read: Once he almost lost his life because of a bundle of firewood. Shame. (“Misganaw”) 58    The first line recalls a specific incident that seems to be very dire, because the protagonist of the story almost loses his life over firewood. The magnitude of the incident seems appropriate, given that firewood is what is scarce in the camp and is what is needed on a daily basis for survival. Thus, when the second line reads “Shame.” in a tone of scorn and with a lack of pity, we realize that the narrator is not very sympathetic to Mesfin’s plight. For all of Mesfin’s difficult and harsh life experiences, he is very unoptimistic and thinks the worst of everyone he meets. Mesfin judges people with every turn: [Mesfin] tolerated the police who behave as if they own the world, and demand so much when they see a refugee. He tolerated the workers of the humanitarian organisations who think that they know the needs of the refugees. (“Misganaw”) His unkind judgments of the people around him make him very unlikeable to his readers and alienate his readers from his already unfamiliar status of refugee. This is why Mesfin sees no hope in his tomorrow – he chooses not to hope. He has already reached the conclusion that, “[i]n a refugee’s life, all tomorrows are the same. No story to tell, no history to write and no future to plan.” We can argue that it is because of Mesfin’s unstable outlook on life that leads to his extreme impressions of the people around him. Yet, at the same time, we must not forget that Mesfin, being featured in the Lesson Module, is the result of an authorial decision. He is also the result of an administrative decision by the institution, the UNHCR, that helped to shape Lesson Modules for teachers. Mesfin the protagonist presents the outline of refugees in a specific manner to teachers and students of this particular Lesson Module. The UNHCR has chosen to victimize Mesfin, destitute and 59    struggling to survive. As a character, Mesfin is further beaten in his despairing state. All this unfavorable circumstances occur outside of the UNHCR camp, and as a result, the camp becomes the only safe, if monotonous place, to be. Once again, as was the case with Jacob in the Kenyan refugee camp and with the speaker in Brecht’s poem, the camp serves as a safe location where refugees fleeing inhospitable lands and devastating conflict can find immediate relief. In the critical analysis segment of this Lesson Module, students are asked to improve on Worknehe’s narrative by rewriting excerpts to increase the fluency of expression and evocative use of language. However, these activities encourage students to align themselves with Mesfin’s perspective and they compromise the critical distance that readers need to have from the texts they are engaging with. In short, the UNHCR Lesson Modules may be a good way to introduce students to the idea of refugees, but they introduce students to only one type of refugee – the refugee who is runs as far as the UNHCR camp for help and awaits repatriation no matter how far away the possibility of repatriation is. UNHCR Comics: Refugee Children 2000 and Refugee Children 2007 Refugee Children 2007 is the latest publication under the series of brochures which aims to raise awareness about the plight of refugee children among other more privileged children in the world. The other two publications are the similarly-named Refugee Children 2000 and Refugee Teenagers (Talbot). These brochures are used by UNHCR facilitators and other personnel to educate young children on who refugee children are. In Teaching Others About Refugees: UNHCR Facilitator’s Manual for 60    Young Educators by John Fielding and Kevin Reed, there are detailed guidelines on how to conduct workshops of varying lengths for nine- to thirteen-year old children involving Refugee Children 2000 as a primary text to shape an understanding of who refugee children are. Some of the accompanying questions include “Who are the children refugees,” “Where do they go for help,” and “Why do they flee? What help is available?” (11). Given the far-ranging reach of the UNHCR’s international operations, many educators of young people as well as the young students they educate use and read these brochures. The educational aims of these brochures are clearly outlined by the UNHCR organization itself. The Psycho-Social and Mental Health Programmes booklet from the Health and Community Development Section, Division of Operations Support of the UNHCR describes the impact of the Refugee Children brochures: Basic guide for children on the work of UNHCR in the world including Short stories about refugee children’s experiences for older children/host community and other non-refugee populations. Discusses children’s needs for food, clean water, health care, school and focuses on their memories and hopes for the future as well. It focuses on emotional reactions of some refugee children to traumatic experiences. (McDonald 9) With such a didactic aim, these brochures become a top-down information channel that enables the UNHCR to shape definite and specific impressions of who and what refugee children – and by extension, all refugees – are. While these illustrated stories can be considered a type of fiction because of the narrative manner in which they tell of the 61    plight of a made-up character, we must read these illustrated stories against the larger brochures they are found in to examine how problematic such fiction is when created to serve the UNHCR’s aims. In each brochure, there is an illustrated story in the form of a comic which describes a specific refugee child’s plight. In Refugee Children 2000, the illustrated story is titled “Amin’s Escape.” “Amin’s Escape” is a story of how Amin, a child in Afghanistan, flees when the country is torn apart by civil war. The story begins with a much summarized and rather truncated version of the civil war history of Afghanistan: AFGHANISTAN IS A DIVIDED COUNTRY. HOSTILE DESERTS AND TALL MOUNTAIN RANGES SEPARATE THE AREAS WHERE PEOPLE LIVE. THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES ARE DIVIDED INTO MANY ETHNIC GROUPS AND CLANS. IN 1979, THE FORCES OF THE SOVIET UNION INVADED AFGHANISTAN. MANY RESISTANCE FACTIONS, CALLED MUJAHEDIN, FOUGHT AGAINST THE SOVIET TROOPS DURING THE 1980s. WHEN THE SOVIET ARMY PULLED OUT OF AFGHANISTAN IN 1989, RESISTANCE FIGHTERS WHO HAD FOUGHT THEIR SOVIET INVADERS FOR TEN YEARS, BEGAN TO FIGHT AGAINST EACH OTHER TO GAIN CONTROL OF THEIR COUNTRY. (Refugee Children 2000 8-9) In this introduction, Afghanistan is painted as a barren and hostile land geographically, through the descriptions of “HOSTILE DESERTS AND TALL MOUNTAIN RANGES” (8). These words are laid over a cover page picture of a war-torn city in the country. This connection between text and picture suggests that the barrenness of the land is due to the 62    fighting among the people living in Afghanistan. The introduction becomes increasingly problematic because it suggests that the decimation in Afghanistan is due to warring groups of its people fighting against one another in a power struggle. The word “DIVIDED” (8), used with “AFGHANISTAN” (8) and later with “THE PEOPLE” (8) who live in Afghanistan reinforces the suggestion that the conflict is a self-made one, thereby implicating all who once lived in that country. If the war among the Afghans desecrated the land, then the hostility of the barren land spills over onto its people, in that they are equally hostile to and barren in progress. Furthermore, the use of capital letters to establish the historical and geographical contexts of Amin’s story reflects a didactic, factual tone. Children reading the story are encouraged by such a firm tone to believe that the things they are reading about are an accurate representation of that which is being described. As the story unfolds, readers find out that Amin is forced to flee from his home because “[t]hey are killing civilians” (10). This unnamed enemy is repeated in the next frame of the story, when the narrator tells readers that “PEOPLE SUSPECTED OF HELPING THE ENEMY WERE BEING KIDNAPPED, TORTURED AND EXECUTED” (11). Who is this enemy? By creating fear in the young reader, who identifies with Amin as the only speaking character who is a child, the unnamed enemy becomes conflated with the Mujahedin. While there is some measure of accuracy in such an equation, to conflate so once again creates the illusion that Afghanistan is only made up of warring factions and that their civil war is internally created. Civilian refugees are then either implicated along with these warring factions or positioned as innocent bystanders who are inadvertently caught up in the conflict. In absolving many other 63    countries (such as the United States) of their parts in the convoluted history of wars in Afghanistan, the UNHCR then posits itself as wholly benevolent and moral in their humanitarian work in helping these Afghan refugees. This is reinforced by the ending to “Amin’s Escape,” when Amin and his family reaches the refugee camps. Young readers are told very firmly that “THERE [in the refugee camp], THEY WERE SAFE. THEY HAD SHELTER, FOOD AND WATER” (13). In masking the full extent of the roles of the superpowers who had meddled in Afghanistan’s affairs for varying reasons, these illustrated stories fail to communicate the harsh consequences of colonial powers and their colonizing acts. The colonial experience is hidden when America is written out of the story and the Soviet Union is only cursorily mentioned. The impact of such a move is the further perpetuation of refugees as pitiful people who need to be helped by generous first-world host countries. What is left out is why and how these refugees came to be refugees and thus, the refugee experience is not properly represented. The young reader is invited to identify with Amin at the outset. There is a picture of Amin next to the title, “Amin’s Escape” (8-9) which identifies who Amin is and allows the reader to follow the protagonist throughout his story. The reader shares Amin’s experiences as he flees Kabul and journeys through dangerous and mountainous territory (11-2) with his family. However, when we arrive at the conclusion of the story, the reader is no longer aligned alongside Amin. Instead, there is a clearly demarcated boundary between the reader and Amin in the form of the Pakistani refugee camp. The refugee is restricted to the refugee camp where it is perceived to be safe. For Amin, his only way out is to return to his country of origin. On the other hand, the reader looks into the camp 64    through the window of the comic panels, but the reader is clearly aware that he or she is not a part of the camp as he or she has no need of aid from the UNHCR. The refugees in this Pakistani refugee camp do not aspire to leave the camp to resettle into a new country. For the refugee, “SAFETY” (12) comes in the form of the refugee camp in Pakistan, where “UNHCR STAFF [ARE] ABLE TO HELP THEM” (13). Such help is only available within the confines of the camp as earlier panels in “Amin’s Escape” have shown how dangerous it is for the refugees outside of their camp. For example, the second last page of the comic is made up of three panels which show the various dangers that lie outside the camp. The first panel shows one of the “MANY ARMED ROADBLOCKS WHICH WERE SET UP BY THE VARIOUS FIGHTING GROUPS;” the second panel shows some of the “MANY LAND-MINES [PLANTED BY THE RIVAL MUJAHEDIN GROUPS; and the third panel shows how “CROSSING THE MOUNTAINS WAS A TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE” (12). Thus, the refugees stay in the camp and “[LONG] FOR THE DAY WHEN THEY COULD RETURN TO THEIR HOME IN AFGHANISTAN” (13). The problem at the heart of such a longing is that many young readers of “Amin’s Escape” will be lulled into thinking that the possibility of repatriation is high and that the stay in the refugee camp is a brief one. In reality, many refugees languish in refugee camps for years and some resettle into a new host community. For example, many of the Lost Boys of the Sudanese civil war in the 1990s resettled overseas in America and those that returned to their villages and homes were often more out of necessity than choice. However, the illustrated story presents Amin’s stay in the Pakistani refugee camp as a temporary and safe one and altogether cuts out any possibility resettlement. In doing so, the message that the illustrated story 65    sends is that refugees are aliens that will eventually return to their countries of origin and will not resettle into other countries. Seven years later, the focus shifts from the Afghanistan civil war to the conflict in Darfur in “Zahra’s Story.” The reason for the Darfur conflict is framed as such: During times of drought and famine, farmers needed to use every available bit of land to farm or forage for food, and they closed off the traditional routes used by the herders. Rather than watch their animals die of starvation in a dried up land, the herders tried to force open the routes and attacked the farmers who tried to block their paths. (Refugee Children 2007 11) The information that has been provided is overly simplistic. Muslim-Christian clashes; ex-British colonial rule and the abrupt decolonization of Sudan; significant governmental policies that separated and shaped North and South Sudan; the geographical location of Darfur; the oil in Sudan; and other equally important socio-political factors are all left out of the story. Even though the illustrated story is targeted at young children who might not understand or absorb such a complex history behind the conflict in Darfur, watering down the clashes to what is seemingly a dispute over food and water for animals reduces the people of Darfur to ignorant nomads who squabble over everyday things. Once again, Zahra and the other civilians caught up in the Darfur conflict cannot turn to their own people for help but need to look to the UNHCR for relief. As the story traces Zahra’s journey, it once again refuses to allow Zahra the possibility of relocation outside of a refugee camp. When Zahra returns from a refugee camp in El Geneina to find her farm taken over by herders, her only option is to return to 66    El Geneina. When El Geneina is invaded by raiders, her only option is to shift laterally from one refugee camp to another in Chad. The story ends with these words: With many others, Zahra tried to find safety in another camp but the Janjaweed continued their attacks. It was time to cross into Chad. Perhaps there was safety and shelter in a refugee camp in Chad. (15) Thus, like Amin, Zahra is an alien refugee who cannot cross into the more stable societies that readers of her story inhabit. She can only remain within refugee camps or return to her conflict-stricken place of origin. Amin’s and Zahra’s stories, “Amin’s Escape” and “Zahra’s Story,” are parts of larger brochures that contain other information on refugee children. The brochures begin in the same fashion – the first section deals with who refugee children are before going on, in the second section, to define “[t]he people whom the UNHCR protects” (2). Then the illustrated story is featured. After the story, the brochures talk about how lost children are protected, the safety and shelter available to refugee children and, finally, how these children “look forward to more peaceful and happy futures” (Refugee Children 2007 3). In the final section on the future of these refugee children, the brochures discuss “local integration” (Refugee Children 2007 33) and “resettlement” (Refugee Children 2007 34). However, the illustrated stories, with their covers alone spanning two pages in the brochures, are clearly the main feature and therefore mostly likely to be the readers’ main takeaway. Compare their message to the short section that is only four pages on alternatives to repatriation and one must wonder how the emphases are placed on the 67    messages in the brochures. We can sum up the intent in the words of the UNHCR’s brochures: The refugee camp becomes their temporary home while they wait for the day when they and their families can go back to their country safely. They need shelter, food, clean water, basic medical care and education. All children have the right to these basic things and the UNHCR and its partners do their best to make sure that they receive them. (Refugee Children 2007 18) These brochures, as promotional materials for the work that the UNHCR does, fail to point out the severe problems faced by different refugees and also fail to individualize refugees for readers of these brochures. Amin and Zahra are two-dimensional refugees who only seek to escape conflict by entering refugee camps. The information that is being communicated is very factual and statistical and do not communicate the refugee experience in detail to the reader – all meaning that could have been found in the various photographs and stories told in these brochures are emptied out and filled with selfpromotional advertisements of the UNHCR’s operations. The illustrated stories are not works of fiction that aim to carry the reality they have overstepped with them – we do not hear Amin or Zahra speak anything beyond simple, short dialogue that is constrained by the brevity of the exchanges – and because they do not communicate the refugee experience, these illustrated stories fall short of performing the role of fiction that Iser describes. These stories fail to fictionalize; they do not “[open] a play space between all the alternatives enumerated” and so do not “[set] off free play which militates against all determinations as untenable restrictions” (Iser 953-4). Readers are alienated from refugees even as they are introduced to them. We only see generic outlines of two 68    possible refugee situations and reactions, but we do not recognize the refugee as an individual. The main problem of these UNHCR texts is that they claim a right to institutional and referential truth simply because they have access to “real-life” refugee individuals and personal recounts. However, this is not a logical equation because the UNHCR has a heavy hand in defining who these refugees are and who gets to speak, and how they speak. By putting these stories in educational lesson plans, they claim an authenticity to the recollection. This should not be the case for refugee literature. Chapter 5: What is the What and its Claims to Literariness and Authenticity I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don’t want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist. (Eggers, What 535) What is the What: A Novel was written by Dave Eggers and was published in 2006. This book is a story about the real life experiences of a Sudanese refugee, Valentino Achak Deng. Valentino is a Lost Boy whose village was destroyed by Arabs. The cover page is a two-tone illustration of Valentino. Before the first chapter begins, the novel opens with a map of Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya. The locations marked on the map trace the route that Valentino walked on his flight from his village, Marial Bai. Immediately after the 69    map, there is a preface which was written by Valentino after the events in the book took place. The preface gives a background of how Valentino met Eggers (through Mary Williams of the Lost Boys Foundation) and how they collaborated to get the book written. The preface also gives a preview of what the book will go on to achieve: “all of the author’s proceeds from the books would be [Valentino’s] and would be used to improve the lives of Sudanese in Sudan and elsewhere” (xiv). As the quote at the start of this chapter shows, the novel is almost autobiographical and the elements in the preface and the location maps provide enhance the feel of the novel as a factual recount of Valentino’s refugee experience. Valentino’s story cuts back and forth between America and Africa. The telling of his life in America is interrupt periodically by flashbacks to his traumatic flight from Marial Bai to America. The opening chapter of the novel reveals that Valentino has already resettled to Atlanta and is living with a roommate. Readers are thrown into the midst of a harrowing robbery as Valentino is robbed by two African-American people who steal most of his valuables. However, as the getaway car does not have enough space, the robbers leave a young boy to guard Valentino until they are able to return for a second trip. As the night goes on and he is unable to speak or move, Valentino assesses various parts of his miserable situation and compares them to his refugee experiences. He tells his captor and us his readers “silent stories” (29) in his head without sound, about these experiences. For example, when he finds out that his captor’s name is “Michael,” he tells a silent story of the Michaels that he knows: Michael, I am happy to know your name. . . . Michael is the name of a saint. Michael is the name of a boy who wants to be a boy. Michael is the name of the 70    man who brought the war to Marial Bai. It is natural to assume that a war like ours came one day, the crack of thunder and then war, falling hard like rain. But first, Michael, there was a darkening sky. (52) With this overview of the Michaels that he knows, Valentino then launches into the story of “the Michael who in 1983 brought the first portents of war to [Valentino’s] village” (53). Thus, it is through these silent stories that we find out about Valentino’s life and experiences as a refugee fleeing the civil war in Sudan and escaping to America. Valentino’s American story lasts about a day. He is robbed and held hostage into the night. When he is released, he tries to seek treatment and justice but is overlooked at the hospital and by the police. In the morning, he goes to work at the gym, Century Club, where he is employed. All along the way, Valentino tells his silent stories to the people he meets on the way, such as Michael, the boy who guarded him, Julian, the receptionist at the hospital, and Ben, the maintenance engineer at Century Club. Yet the single night lasts far longer than twenty-four hours for us readers. The night lasts 535 pages of the novel that is What is the What, and within these pages we are taken on a journey that lasts many years, from the time when he was six years old and forced to flee his village to when he is an adult in Atlanta, preparing to move on with life. Along the way, we are flooded with recollections of Valentino’s flight from Sudan, his life as a refugee and his resettlement as a refugee immigrant. Along the way, we are led to hear Valentino’s voice and see his past selves as characters within his story, but at the back of our minds as readers we know that the author of the book is Dave Eggers and not Valentino Achak Deng. Even the opening lines of the acknowledgments 71    read thus, “The author and Valentino Achak Deng would like to thank . . .” (537). The book has as its title on the front cover, What is the What: A Novel.” A few pages later on the inside cover, it calls itself, somewhat complicatedly, “What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel.” Is the book a novel or is it an autobiography? Is it a biography written by Dave Eggers about Valentino Achak Deng or a novel passing itself off as Valentino’s memoirs? This tricky interweaving of two seemingly disparate forms reveals how the book negotiates between evoking a genuine refugee experience and avoiding laying claim to an ability to recreate a factual experience. We ask who the real writer is, Eggers or Valentino. Perhaps it is a futile question to ask. The voice that the reader hears is layered. At the heart of the book is Valentino the refugee, who fled his hometown when the Arabs invaded Marial Bai. There also is Valentino the resettled Lost Boy, whose identity has caused him trouble with his American neighbors. There is Dave Eggers, author, whose words Valentino borrows to share his autobiography and who borrows Valentino’s lived experiences to tell a story. Thus, we must consider the following questions. Why is it that Dave Eggers chose to present the story from the perspective of Valentino Achak Deng and to make himself as transparent as possible? Yet, why is it that Dave Eggers also chose to leave his mark of authorship behind, in calling the semi-autobiography “a novel” (cover page) and in referring to himself (and not Valentino) as the author? How do these issues of authorship affect the stories we hear within the book and our understanding of what refugee literature is? 72    The Novel-Autobiography The literary world is the powerful space that Valentino is only able to harness through his collaboration with Eggers. Before he met Eggers, Valentino was trapped in a downward spiral in Atlanta where he had to work hard just to make ends meet. He wanted more than that, because “[f]or years [he had] vowed to return home, but not until [he] had finished [his] college education” (534). Also, he wanted to “tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don’t want to listen, to people who seek [him] out and to those who run” (535). Eggers has empowered him to do so. Eggers himself was already an established writer when he started to collaborate with Valentino, having had written A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) and You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002). Thus, when they both collaborated to create What is the What, a question was asked about the unusual form of the creation: Why was the book fictionalized, as opposed to being strictly nonfiction? And why didn’t Valentino write the book himself? . . . When Valentino first arrived in the United States, he wanted to make his story known so that it might help Westerners understand the conflict in Sudan. But his written English was very limited. . . . After years of consultation and interviews, Valentino and Dave [Eggers] decided the best way to tell the story would be to tell it in Valentino’s voice. But because Valentino was very young when many of the book’s events took place, there is no way he can recount his life with the degree of detail necessary for a compelling book. (“Reader’s Guide” 2) 73    The answer to the question offers up a few reasons for the decision. Firstly, Valentino did not write the book himself because his written English was limited. Hence, it was practical to engage Eggers to facilitate the writing of the book in Valentino’s voice so that it would seem like Valentino had written the story himself. After all, the assumption offered is that Valentino would have written the book himself had his grasp of written English been better. Furthermore, Eggers lends his literary clout as an established author in America who has cemented his status with his own memoir and other fiction and non-fiction works. Eggers also had founded McSweeney’s before What is the What was published (“About Dave”). Eggers’s name lends an authority to the story being told, because an American writer willing to help Valentino get his story published in English by crafting the story for him shows an American’s validation of the worth of Valentino’s experiences. The importance of such validation is such that it firmly installs Valentino’s story at the heart of American literature. By placing his name as the author on the cover of What is the What, Eggers enables the book to reach a wider audience and positions the book within the American canon of contemporary literature. Secondly, the book was fictionalized because of the problem of factual and accurate representation. Eggers and Valentino recognized the problems of memory over time and the intricacies of any piece of recollection and storytelling, and decided that it was more valuable to create a story that would evoke the powerful experience that is the refugee experience than to write a factual account that may be challenged over minor details that are not necessarily crucial to a reader’s understanding of the overall experience. 74    In the event of many other writers of biographies and autobiographies, their recounts are challenged because the texts produced claim to reflect the truth in an accurate and believable manner. For example, Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s testimonio has been challenged for its accuracy by anthropologist David Stoll, when he asserts that “Ms. Menchu’s book “cannot be the eyewitness account it purports to be” because the Nobel laureate repeatedly describes “experiences she never had herself” (qtd. in Rohter). Ishmael Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, is accused of having “grossly exaggerated his story” and that “the book’s most dramatic plot twists . . . don’t check out at all” (Sherman). Eggers circumvents this accuracy death trap by labeling the book an outright novel, in which fiction reigns supreme. Harking back to what Iser says in “Fictionalizing,” “the lie oversteps the truth, and the literary work oversteps the real world which it incorporates” (939). This important aspect of literary fiction is such that the fiction allows the real world in which it reflects the ability to fracture, to expand, and to evoke, simply because it has already overstepped the real. What is the What oversteps the real world of Valentino’s lived experiences, experiences which have already been rendered inaccurate (overstepped) by the sheer act of retelling. The fear and loneliness of “trekking across many punishing landscapes while being bombed by Sudanese air forces, while dodging landmines, while being preyed upon by wild beasts and human killers” (xiii) can be painted by the series of events described from Pages 156-160 of What is the What, in which Valentino the protagonist encounters “helicopter gunships” (157) and finds out that “[f]ive boys had been killed, three immediately and two others, whose legs had been shredded by the bombs, were alive long enough to watch the blood leave their bodies and darken the earth” (159). If such 75    narrative elaboration were to be presented in a courthouse or in a factual recount, the refugee is vulnerable to accusations of inaccuracy and falsehood. However, within the pages of the novel, elaboration and details are precisely that which is “necessary for a compelling book” (Readers Guide, 2) that captures the attention and sympathy of the readers. In acknowledging that the book is a novel, the book cannot be accused of lying and exaggeration because literary fiction has overstepped the real to evoke a narrative that does not claim to faithfully recreate the lived refugee experience. By labeling the novel so, What is the What is found in the fiction section of bookstores and libraries. This is important in establishing the novel as a book of force in the English-reading world without falling into the trap of being deemed “inauthentic.” Many books that are classified outright as autobiography bear down upon their authors as these authors are expected to write in a realist, chronological manner that fits how they lived their lives. Books that do not do so are often criticized. For example, Frank Chin, an author and a playwright, accuses Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts as a text which destroys [Chinese] history and literature “by restating a White racist stereotype of the Chinese” (135). Chin’s accusation suggests that there is a “pure” Chinese tradition that Kingston was unfaithful to and had betrayed. Yet, as far as storytelling traditions go, traditions are formed because of a canon of similar stories that endure over time. Kingston’s memoirs are vulnerable because they are accounts, albeit of her personal life. Because What is the What emphasizes that it is a novel, it cannot be held accountable to a “pure” Sudanese refugee experience. Thus, it does not betray its referent simply because there is not one. In this manner, the fictionalizing of Valentino’s experience by Dave Eggers deliberately shapes the 76    audience’s reception of the book and its content and because the book is a work of fiction, it cannot be held hostage by historical and truth claims that are vulnerable to falsehoods and misrepresentations. Instead, the artificial, fictional world of What is the What is merely informed by a reality which has been brought along in the process of overstepping it. The literary work is the manifestation of what Iser calls “a world invented by poetry” and is the domain in which “the artificial and the socio-political” are “telescoped” (941). The artificial is the work of art and the socio-political is the biography the work of art captures. Thus, literature, able to traffic between the represented artificial and the experienced sociopolitical, amplifies both the artificial and the socio-political by overlapping the two. Every reader of the novel hears resonances of newspaper articles and lived experiences in the novel. The reader is able to understand the under-represented emotions and experiences that many statistical reports do not reflect about the conflicts in Sudan. The story told in the novel enables Dave Eggers to “dispense with factors that do not serve the larger narrative” (Iser 943) and to stage “the possibilities [refugees] derive from [themselves] and project onto the world” (Iser 953). Many of the experiences within the book are “based on [Eggers’s] imagining, and other reports, and maybe a human-rights report or another Lost Boy’s account” (“Reader’s Guide” 13). Also, Eggers conflates Valentino’s experiences with stories of other Lost Boys. On the other hand, we must also not forget that What is the What is an autobiography. There is the very significant line on the book’s inner cover, “The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng,” reminding us that the book is also meant to function as an autobiography. The novel is an autobiographical one, despite it being a 77    work of fiction. Of the autobiography form, Thomas Philipp writes that “[t]he worldview of the modern man permits one to look at one’s own life story, discovering in it the value of the uniquely individual experience, yet at the same time recognizing in it a meaning of a more general human dimension” (573). Philipp suggests that the autobiography becomes a means of access for an individual to locate his place in history. In What is the What, Valentino shares how, when he was struggling in Sudan and in the other parts of North Africa that his walk had taken him to, he “thought the whole world had turned blind eyes on the fate that was befalling [him] and the people of southern Sudan” (Eggers, What xiii). After he survived his ordeal, Valentino is determined to “reach out to others to help them understand Sudan’s place in our global community” (Eggers, What xiv). By helping to create the book and by describing the experiences of many people from southern Sudan, he reminds writers and readers of history that the people of southern Sudan have suffered greatly from a devastating civil war and that their suffering must not go unnoticed. Philipp’s description of the autobiography resonates with a function of the testimonio, in that the speakers in both the autobiography and the testimonio use their urgent declaration of a set of lived experiences to draw attention to a larger problem at the heart of these experiences. In Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s case, she drew attention to the plight of the minority poor in Guatemala and how they were being ill-treated. In Valentino’s case, Eggers was using Valentino’s life story to draw attention to the plight of the Lost Boys of Sudan and, more importantly, the fate of refugees all around the world. What is the What, a story about the plight of the Lost Boys refugees fleeing Sudan, may seem to be the individual story of Valentino Achak Deng and his refugee 78    experience. However, What is the What and the Eggers-Valentino collaboration have given rise to the VAD Foundation, a foundation which aims to help Sudanese refugees and to aid in rebuilding war-torn Sudan. Clearly, Eggers’s use of “autobiography” in the title alongside “novel” is a loaded move, at once contesting both natures of fiction and autobiography and challenging both forms to broaden their boundaries. To understand this phenomenon, we borrow from E. H. Jones and his article, “Autofiction: A Brief History of a Neologism:” Whereas for Doubrovsky, autofiction represents the fictionalisation of a framework through which to represent a ‘deeper truth of selfhood, Colonna advocates the same word being used for those literary texts in which the writer imagines a different life for him or herself. (178) Barring an examination of the history and origins of autofiction, what Jones points out here are two, I think not necessarily divergent, opinions of what autofiction – works that approximate to autobiographical fictions – can mean. Doubrovsky talks of a type of fiction that reflects the individual more clearly while Colonna’s interpretation enables writers of autofiction to imagine possible alternatives to their present lives. What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel can be read as autofiction because the framework of the refugee experience is fictionalized in Valentino’s memories of his walk and resettlement. The writer (and by extension, the reader) imagines Valentino as a representative of all the Lost Boys and their lived experiences above and beyond his own lived experiences. After all, even though the book was written by Dave Eggers, we cannot discount the fact that the book rose out of “years of consultations and 79    interviews” and because “the best way to tell the story would be to tell it in Valentino’s voice” (“Reader’s Guide” 2). Thus, calling the novel an autobiography enables Eggers to overstep the flaws in Valentino’s memories and the individual experiences he had to infuse the memories with the epic power of being the aggregation of many other Lost Boys and their refugee experiences, without leaving behind the individual life of Valentino Achak Deng. After all, Valentino Achak Deng exists. Without him, there would be no book either. Returning to two questions earlier asked, why is it that Dave Eggers chose to let the novel be represented from the perspective of Valentino and yet still leave marks of his authorship behind in the text? Wolfgang Iser remarks that “boundary-crossing may be viewed as a hallmark of fictionalizing” (939). In the form of the book itself, the ability of the book to be novel and autobiography at once takes place because the boundaries marking novel and autobiography have been transgressed. With this novel, Valentino enters into mainstream American consciousness because the American public will read such a novel. Furthermore, they will not judge him entirely based on the factual accuracy of his autobiography because it is, after all, a novel. Such boundary-crossing, from the outside to the inside, is reminiscent of the borders that Valentino crossed in his flight from Marial Bai. The space of the literary is thus opened up in this novel-autobiography through the creation of a “structure of double meaning, which is not meaning itself but a matrix for generating meaning” (Iser 945). Iser goes on to elaborate that “[d]ouble meaning takes on the form of simultaneous concealment and revelation, always saying something that is different from what it means in order to adumbrate something that oversteps what it refers to” (945). In the case of What is the What, Valentino’s lived 80    refugee experience has overstepped its real-life origins to become a narrative in a work of literary fiction that historicizes the Sudanese conflict and its victims. If double meaning results in “a condition otherwise unattainable in the ways in which normal life takes its course” (945), it is because fictionalizing goes beyond “[disguising to enable] one to step beyond the bounds of what one is [to] “enable us to become what we want to be” (Iser 946). Iser argues that this condition – “being “beside oneself”” (946) – is “the minimal condition for creating one’s own self and the very world in which one finds oneself” (946). The telling of Valentino’s lived experiences enable them to become more than what they are, just as Valentino becomes more than who he is. Valentino and Eggers have opened up the possibility of infusing one man’s story with the meaning of many individual stories, availing of more meaning to readers of the novel than such non-fiction documents as the UNHCR Convention and Protocol, socio-scientific studies, or ethico-political writings of policies and philosophers, because “[t]o get beyond the brief accounts of all the conflicts in Sudan and to humanize the country’s suffering, it was necessary to include all the elements of effective storytelling – detail, dialogue, and a comprehensible narrative” (“Reader’s Guide” 2). In considering the complex nature of What is the What as a novel-autobiography, we must not forget to consider the agenda of the book. What is the story saying? Eggers and Valentino establish upfront that What is the What is meant to take the individual story of Valentino the refugee and transform it into a larger narrative that reaches out to its international audience so that they can “understand Sudan’s place in our global community” (Eggers, What xiv). This makes the story that is told in the pages of the book doubly significant, because it shapes an international refugee for readers of the book even 81    as Valentino finds a voice among the pages of the book. Of this complex nature, David Amsden of New York Books writes: What is the What is a portrait of a character that forces us to examine our world and ourselves, and how our struggle for identity is more of a collective battle than we’re often willing to admit. For all the bleak territory covered, the novel is also a reminder that remembering is both a form of sacrifice and salvation. To forget, Valentino says, “would be something less than human.” Throughout the novel, names play a great role in defining the refugee and in dictating what part of the refugee is noticed or overlooked. Long before we learn of Valentino’s name or who he is, we find out that he is not from America when the two robbers refer to him as “Africa” (Eggers, What 4). “Africa” rapidly degenerates to “motherfucker” (5) as the robbers get angry. Only after these name-calling incidents do we realize that Valentino is called “Valentino,” which is “a strange name for a guy from Africa” (13). However, we find out that he was so named because he was baptized by a Catholic priest and obtaining his Christian name of “Valentino” was a part of the baptism rites (13-4). That we find out about Africa long before we learn of Valentino shows how important Valentino’s place of origin, Africa, is to What is the What. Africa is the place that will go on to feature distinctly against Atlanta, such that readers of the novel will realize that Eggers means to juxtapose Africa and Atlanta to highlight the many differences living in Africa and living in Atlanta entail. Another reason why “Africa” features so early in the novel is to place an emphasis on the role of race in the rest of the story. The novel suggests that “African-American” (3) and “Africa” (4) are two different peoples despite possible outward similarities. In calling Valentino “motherfucker” (5), the African- 82    American robbers reject Valentino from African-American society. The sarcastic manner in which Powder, one of the robbers, reminds Valentino of his outsider status, is clear when Powder tells Valentino that, “because we’re brothers and all, I’ll teach you a lesson. Don’t you know you shouldn’t open your door to strangers?” (5). Thus, when Eggers delays the introduction of Valentino’s name until the end of the chapter, Powder’s ignorant dismissal of Valentino’s individuality becomes unjust and threatening to Valentino’s person. Without knowing who Valentino is, Valentino is not recognized and he can be erased very easily at any time. When we find out that “Africa” and “motherfucker” are really two words for one person called Valentino, we readers are humbled in our recognition of Valentino as a person. Achak, Dominic, Sudan – these are the various monikers Valentino has received from the many circumstances he had found himself in: ‐ What are you staring at Achak? [My mother] asks, laughing at me, using my given name, the name I used until it was overtaken by nicknames in Ethiopia and Kakuma, so many names. (35) I did not contradict him. I had almost forgotten that I had used the name Dominic on my application. (493) ‐ Pray, Sudan. We are praying for you. (497) “Dominic” had been acquired in the Kakuma refugee camp while “Sudan” was acquired when he had been picked up by some Kenyans after a nasty road accident. Each of these names refer to a specific time and place in Valentino’s personal history and they accumulate through the book to paint a person, Valentino Achak Deng, who carries with 83    him fragments of his Sudanese past, his refugee experience, and his subsequent Americanization. The names also mark his internationality and personality, thereby situating Valentino the refugee as an individual living in Atlanta and as a marker of Sudanese conflict in history. Just like Valentino, What is the What has a number of names. “What is the What,” “What is the What : A Novel,” “What is the What: An Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel” – all these names are necessary for the many reasons on the agenda they fulfill. There are many reasons that the book is meant to serve, and the conclusion to What is the What reveals some of these reasons: I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don’t want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist. (Eggers, What 535) The power of having so many names in the book becomes a marker of Valentino’s story as well. Valentino, at one point in the novel, intuits the power of names: Each of us [Lost Boys] has a half-dozen identities: there are nicknames, there are catechism names, the names we adopted to survive or to leave Kakuma. Having many names has been necessary for many reasons that refugees know intimately. (Eggers, What 260) Having so many names situate mark historical events in the figure of the refugee. The names also allow the refugee to access a form of survival in historical memory. Every time a refugee hears his name being called out, he knows that he is still alive. This 84    survival becomes a compellation, for “I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words” (535). The refugee, embodied in and respected by Valentino Achak Deng, speaks to whoever is around him about his story. The communicating of his experiences is very important because it goes some way to prevent the refugees from permanently staying in the refugee camp in limbo and from living in fear in war-torn countries. It also makes host communities and everyone else around the world sit up and acknowledge the unnoticed spillovers of a world that has produced so many of these refugees, some of whom have found their way across borders into new countries to seek asylum. Yet, for Valentino, just telling the story to his immediate neighbor is not enough. In the preface to What is the What, Valentino tells of the impetus that motivated the book: This book began as part of my struggle to reach out to others through public speaking. I told my story to many audiences, but I wanted the world to know the whole truth of my existence. (xiii) Telling his story will reinforce the fact that Valentino has survived and still exists. There is one scene in the novel in which Valentino’s phone does not stop ringing. He has been attacked by robbers and cannot answer his calls, but his “inner voice” explains the purpose of these many calls: “Look at this pimp,” Powder says, “his phone’s ringing every minute. You some kind of pimp, prince?” 85    If I had not set rules, the phone would ring without end. There is a circle of perhaps three hundred Sudanese in the U.S. who keep in touch, me with them but more often them with me, and we do so in a way that might be considered excessive. . . . But with our relocation to the United States, again it is just boys. There are very few Sudanese women in the U.S., and very few elders, and thus we rely on each other for virtually everything. This has its disadvantages, for very frequently, we are sharing unfounded rumors and abject paranoia (What 16). In calling, they hope that the person on the other end of the line has the answers, reassurances and platitudes they seek. It is more important to call than to have actual information, for in calling each other, meaning multiplies with each conversation held. This ability to multiply wards against fatality and so the boys “rely on each other for virtually everything” (16). Valentino was already a public speaker before he met Eggers, but he still felt the need to tell his story in book form to reach out to a wider audience; again we see that it is the telling and retelling that enables the story and its participants to survive. Throughout the novel, Valentino interacts with many different African-American characters. As the story unfolds, we begin to realize that Eggers is mapping the Sudanese newcomer onto his counterpart. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. (Du Bois 16-7) The double-consciousness that Du Bois describes is the self-awareness that an AfricanAmerican has living in white America. This double-consciousness came about because 86    Africans were brought into America by the slave trade in the 1500s and has given rise to many studies of the resultant “twoness, – an American, a Negro” (Du Bois 17). The same double-consciousness can be applied to the African-American viewing an African trying to enter white American society, because the African recalls the African-American’s ancestors who went through a similar diaspora. Dickson Bruce writes about Du Bois’s sense of double consciousness: . . . first the real power of white stereotypes in black life and thought and second the double consciousness created by the practical racism that excluded every black American from the mainstream of the society, the double consciousness of being both an American and not an American – by double consciousness Du Bois referred most importantly to an internal conflict in the African American individual between what was “African” and what was “American.” (Bruce 301) It is thus ironic that when the focus of such a diasporic identity is placed upon the African refugee – in the case of Valentino, the Sudanese – the same stereotypes and racism occurs. Powder, the African-American who robs Valentino, brusquely calls Valentino “Africa” (Eggers, What 5) and tells him that Valentino had been mistaken to open his door to a stranger (5). Because of this act of carelessness, the robbery is validated and Valentino should “sit [his] ass down and watch how it’s done” (6). Powder, sonicknamed for his “vast powder-blue baseball jacket” (4) is the African-American who forgot his ancestry and abused Valentino’s trust. Valentino does not even see Powder’s blackness for he called him Powder because of the light blue jacket that Powder was wearing. Valentino thought Powder was just an everyday American (who likes baseball). 87    Another incident takes place when Valentino encounters “two African-American teenagers” (19) who verbally abuse him for his perceived intrusion into their social space: “Yo,” one of the boys said to me. “Yo freak, where you from?” I turned and told him I was from Sudan. This gave him pause. Sudan is not well known, or was not well known until the war the Islamists brought to us twenty years ago, with its proxy armies, its untethered militias, was brought, in 2003, to Darfur. “You know,” the teenager said, tilting his head and sizing me up, “you’re one of those Africans who sold us out.” He went on in this vein for some time, and it became clear that he thought I was responsible for the enslaving of his ancestors. Accordingly, he and his friend followed me for a block, talking to my back, again suggesting that I go back to Africa. This idea has been posed to Achor Achor, too, and now my two guests have said it. Just a moment ago, Powder looked at me with some compassion and asked, “Man, why you even here? You coming here to wear your suits and act like you’re all educated? Didn’t you know you were gonna get got here?” (18-9) Eggers performs a similar intrusion into the American social space the book has, when Valentino the relocated Lost Boy constantly juts into the main event (of him being robbed and subsequently trying to seek treatment) with his memories of his refugee experiences. This complex framework that lasts throughout the novel is a way for Eggers and Valentino to call their non-refugee readers to consider how refugees are treated in host societies. Eggers questions whether all refugees have to learn about their host country by being “got” (19) and whether there can be other ways of refugees integrating into a safer, 88    newer society. Thus, double-consciousness functions like a two-way mirror, reminding the American society that they should not marginalize incoming refugees and that there are more links between the early American history and refugees in Africa that one would suppose. There are many parallels in the narrative between locations in America and Africa. The symmetry reveals that Valentino is no different an individual from an American citizen; the diversity of his life experiences should not alienate him from other people or strip him of his basic rights. In switching back and forth between America and Africa, the tiny apartment which Valentino shares with his Sudanese housemate, Achor Achor, and where he is robbed, reflects Marial Bai, his home in southern Sudan where he lived with his family and was robbed of when the civil war broke out. The hostile environment in Valentino’s environment questions the reception refugees receive when they reach a new place of abode. Carol Mortland describes a reception that is frosty and intimidating: “Often refugees arrive in the United States thinking they speak English only to discover that they possess only the most rudimentary survival and pronunciation skills. They come armed with certificates . . . [that will not] mean [anything] in America” (401). Valentino finds this out to be true, because “[t]hough the Sudanese elders had warned [the younger refugees] of crime in the United States, this sort of thing was not part of [their] official orientation” (Eggers, What 17). Thus, when Valentino arrives in the United States and is robbed, he is shocked and angry. Valentino’s long wait in the hospital reception area becomes another ordeal similar to his walk from Marial Bai to Kakuma, the refugee camp before he finally gets relocated to America. The long period of uncertainty and waiting reflects how he is 89    ignored and abandoned. Julian, the receptionist, prevents Valentino from reaching the doctor and medical help. Julian becomes a symbol of perverted authority, a reminder of the corrupted forces of power in Sudan that caused much chaos. What Julian does is equally unforgivable, because he denies help to the needy. Finally, Valentino does not get the medical attention he sought and the hospital authorities “have made a fool of” (347) Valentino. As the locations in America symmetrically reflect earlier locations in Africa, we see how What is the What judges the people Valentino has met by showing them to be no different from persecutors in Sudan and Kenya that Valentino has encountered. At the same time, America is not a complete write-off because the end of the parallel journey is different, for in coming to America, Valentino is able to dream of the day he will eventually return to Marial Bai for a new beginning, a day when he is “stepping off a plane, wearing a suit, carrying a suitcase, [his] diploma entombed in leather inside, and into the embrace of the town and [his] family” (534). In an essay, “It Was Just Boys Walking”, Eggers recalls his journey in writing What is the What after “the thousands of hours [Valentino had] given to the process” of writing the book. By his account, in order to crystallize the book that would be published, Eggers and Valentino “would have to return to southern Sudan, to Valentino’s hometown of Marial Bai, if either of [them] hoped to tell the story with any degree of accuracy” (“It Was Just”). They did and the book was written. The novel that we have combines the stories Valentino and everyone who ever suffered as a refugee into a powerful book that evokes sympathy and requests hospitality for refugees. It is when such powerful emotions are evoked that the novel has achieved its purpose of representing the refugee’s voice. It is then that readers of What is the What will find it “impossible [to pretend] that 90    [refugees] do not exist” (Eggers, What 535). Valentino the refugee has now become Valentino the social-change-maker, someone who is able to use the powerful space of the literary to tell his story and evoke compassion and recognition for (not only Sudanese) refugees. Thus, we see how What is the What is a powerful novel that foregrounds the refugee experience to bring about social change in the form of a greater awareness of and compassion for refugees and in the form of social aid, recognition, and remembering. Co-Authorship and Literariness One of the most significant things about this novel is that Valentino collaborated with Eggers specifically to tell his story so that “the world [would] know the whole truth of [his] existence” (xiii). As the quote heading this chapter shows, What is the What suggests that when the “air is filled with [the words of refugees]” (535), when the refugees are able to speak and represent themselves, the readers and the world-at-large will not be ignorant of the existence of refugees in the international community as well as their home societies. Far from a basic call to awareness that other refugee novels sometimes are, What is the What outrightly lists its intentions “to reach out to others to help them understand Sudan’s place in our global community” (xiv) and “to reach out to a wider audience by telling the story of [Valentino’s] life in book form” (xiii). The novel tackles difficult issues such as what it means to be the “voice of a refugee” and how one can evoke the refugee experience without alienating the reader, but more importantly, the novel reveals the common position of a refugee within his host country and the possibilities that lie open to both refugee and reader when a refugee shares his story with other people. Also, this novel is a distinctive refugee novel in which the refugee shapes 91    his own narrative through a series of interviews with the author and breaches the mainstream consciousness of a foreign society. Eggers collaborated with Valentino Achak Deng in What is the What to create a book that allows Valentino the refugee to share his experiences with an audience that goes beyond the English-educated American public. This purpose of the novel is sociopolitical – to reinstate the Sudanese refugee into worldwide public consciousness and to reclaim refugees from political and social suppression. In order to do so, the novel has to deal with issues of self-representation and truth. What is the What has to negotiate between telling an emotionally accurate refugee story and telling a historically factual story. The novel has also had to negotiate between the autobiography form and the voices of two authors, Eggers and Valentino. It is crucial that both Eggers and Valentino are heard, because it reminds readers that inasmuch as Valentino the refugee has been ostracized by the segment of that American society he found himself within, he was also dependent on other Americans for help in order to get his story heard. This double relationship that the refugee has with his host society is portrayed in the novel in a parodic manner. Of parody, Linda Hutcheon writes, in A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, that: . . . parody is a form of indirect as well as double-voiced discourse, but it is not parasitic in any way. . . . Its two voices neither merge nor cancel each other out; they work together, while remaining distinct in their defining difference. In this sense, parody might be said to be, at heart, less an aggressive than a conciliatory 92    rhetorical strategy, building upon more than attacking its other, while still retaining its critical distance. (xiv) If Eggers is the voice of the concerned American citizen who sympathizes with the resettled refugees he meets in America and if Valentino is the voice of the refugees who flee their countries in search for a better place of refuge, then, their voices blend together to call for justice and help for these refugees. If Eggers is the voice of the popular American writer with an ability to speak English and if Valentino is the embittered refugee who realizes that American is not the dreamland that many refugee camp facilitators make it out to be, then, their voices blend together in a call for honesty and respect from readers to the story of a refugee’s experiences. Together, both the call for justice and help as well as the call for honesty and respect create a political positioning for What is the What, because the novel transcends its initial literary status to make a political statement on the situation of refugees in the world today. Parody in What is the What establishes the refugee’s voice in a political arena to reveal the problems of governance and international relations regarding individual human rights. Also, parody enables Eggers and Valentino to position their novel alongside the mainstream literary texts that they imitate and apart from the same texts with their larger political agenda. Hutcheon elaborates on parody: Parody is, then, an important way for modern artists to come to terms with the past – through ironic recoding or . . . “trans-contextualizing.” Its historical antecedents are the classical and Renaissance practices of imitation, though with 93    more stress on difference and distance from the original text or set of conventions. (101) In some ways, parody might be said to resemble metaphor. Both require that the decoder construct a second meaning through inferences about surface statements and supplement the foreground with acknowledgement and knowledge of a backgrounded context. (33-4) To conceive of What is the What as a parody would be to concede that there are two different, yet related, sets of meaning in the novel. The first can be thought of as the “primary” set of meaning that lays out the parameters of the textual references the author is bound to work within. In the case of What is the What, this meaning is created when Valentino tells his story to Michael, when Valentino tells his story to Eggers so that the book can be written and when Eggers tells the story to his readers. The telling and retelling are infused with various significances – the contrast between Michael, the unhearing audience, and Eggers, the receptive audience reveals how important it is for What is the What to be read by a discerning reader. Because Michael did not hear, he did not sympathize with Valentino and instead continued to persecute Valentino. Because Eggers heard and sympathized, he worked together with Valentino to create What is the What. They also subsequently set up the VAD Foundation to aid victims of the Sudanese conflict. The “secondary” set of meaning can be thought of as the implications the novel has on the status of refugees of the Sudanese conflict as well as refugees elsewhere around the world. Refugees, many of them originating from countries of severe conflict 94    and poor economy, do not have access to education or books. Thus, for a refugee experience to be represented in English, the significance is large. Also, it is a rare occurrence for the refugee experience to be presented to the general public in the pages of a literary novel. Usually, we read about refugees in the news. These factors, added up, may cause the refugee experience to be doubted as a fabrication of words. On the other hand, far more importantly, it also prompts its readers to seek out what is or is not accurate. The unfamiliar sight of a refugee presenting his autobiography in the pages of an English novel, a novel whose creation is attributed to an American author, is jarringly different from other types of novels. Even though the conventional codes of writing and publication are employed, there is “repetition with critical distance” (Hutcheon 6) and the reader is made aware that the novel deals with a very unconventional subject. Hutcheon asserts that the contemporary parodic text has the power to renew the forms which it draws from: Parody today is endowed with the power to renew. It need not do so, but it can. (115) The autobiography and the novel – both forms which can be found in What is the What – are preceded by the many interviews that refugees have to undergo to be resettled in a new host country. The autobiography, representative of truth and fact, and the novel, representative of stories and expressions, are seemingly disparate forms of art. However, Eggers has inverted both forms from their dissimilarity into a new form, that of the autobiographical novel. In this new form, stories evoke true emotions while historical truths are exposed for their fabricated nature. By extension, the international politics that 95    is involved in the relocation of Sudanese refugees to other countries are also vulnerable to revision through parody. Refugees sharing the refugee experience have only their life stories to tell – any embellishment can undermine credibility, especially so in the courtroom or in resettlement interviews. Yet, the act of telling their stories is predicated on a representation, or a seeming divergence from the truth that lies within their lived experiences. In the case of refugees, the problem of representation is enlarged because of their status. Refugees are non-civilians, aliens who are accorded temporary social status outside of the society; their transient, displaced status refuses them easy access to with a discerning audience. The autobiographical form, the form in which life stories are told, has to be transformed into a form of writing that can sufficiently represent the lived experiences of these refugees without compromising the experiences that are re-presented to readers. Thus, What is the What, as a transgressor of the autobiography and the novel, empowers the book to be a socially aware one. The parable, that the leading question in the title references, reveals the political positioning of the book. The book endorses Dinkas over Arabs in the Sudanese conflict. “What is the What” is a reference to a parable Valentino’s father tells to his Arab guests at dinner one night: - You didn’t tell us the answer: What is the What? My father shrugged. - We don’t know. No one knows. . . . I had heard the story of the cattle and the What many times, but never before had it ended this way. In the version my father told me, God had given the What to the 96    Arabs, and this was why the Arabs were inferior. The Dinka were given the cattle first, and the Arabs had tried to steal them. . . . But none of this was part of my father’s story this night, and I was glad. I was proud of my father, for he had altered the story to protect the feelings of Sadiq and the other traders. He was sure that the Arabs knew they were inferior to the Dinka, but he knew it would not be polite to explain this to them at dinner. (63) The father leaves the ending open, because if he mentioned that the What was inferior and given to the second-placed Arabs, he would offend his guests. However, in retelling Valentino’s father’s story in the novel, Eggers establishes a perspective in which the Arabs are the wrongdoers and the Dinkas are the vulnerable citizens innocently caught up in the greed of a superior race. Titling the book as “What is the What” enables the novel to pass judgment on the Arabs and indict them in their crime. Through the eyes of Valentino, in Eggers’ words, the novel repositions right and wrong in the history of the Sudanese civil war. The literary becomes a place where ethics can be redefined and politics can be superseded. Because the book passes judgment on the Arabs and the Dinkas, What is the What is a court of law where witnessing takes place. The refugee becomes a witness. With the stories he shares, the refugee bears witness to the atrocities that have been inflicted on him. In his position as witness, removes himself from being sole victim or perpetrator. This negotiation within the boundaries of the narrative is important as it redeems the figure of the refugee from a disempowered state – he is now able to influence his readers’ judgment. Not only does the novel indict the Arabs, it also calls to court its ignorant readers: 97    Tell me, where is your mother, Michael? Have you ever seen her terrified? No child should see this. It is the end of childhood, when you see your mother’s face slacken, her eyes dead. When she is defeated by simply seeing the threat approaching. When she does not believe she can save you. (What 88) The novel is told through the thoughts of Valentino, first as he lies on the floor bound by his captors and then as he waits in the hospital and is ignored by the receptionist. Everything is filtered through Valentino’s perspective and it is a jarring reminder to readers that they were not a part of his refugee experience. The novel also shapes the position that readers take. In our ignorance, we are forced into the position of Powder, Michael, Julian, and the visitors to the gym. All these people are proud in their ignorance, as the exchange quoted above shows. Michael, “[a] boy [who] can be no more than ten” (25), is guarding Valentino. Michael’s superiority and power arises from his freedom to move and Valentino’s bound state. Yet, Michael is the restricted one. He is restricted by his failure to sympathize with Valentino, wrong in his ignorance. Just like Michael, most of us have not seen our mothers terrified or dead. The novel forces us to consider our privileged states – more than just a political judgment on the Arabs, it is also a call to action – one cannot remain ignorant and unaware. After reading the novel, we are judged by Valentino’s/Eggers’ words: How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist. (535) This is an insistent call throughout the novel, because readers cannot return to their ignorant condition after reading the book. 98    The novel remarks on the destructiveness of power politics and the need for communal and international peace. The full parable, unedited for Valentino’s father’s Arab guests, reflects so: - When God created the earth, he first made us, the monyjang. Yes, first the made the monyjang, the first man, and he made him the tallest and strongest of people under the sky . . . - Yes, God made the monyjang tall and strong, and he made their women beautiful, more beautiful than any of the creatures on the land. . . . and when God was done, and the monyjang were standing on the earth waiting for instruction, God asked the man “Now that you are here, on the most sacred and fertile land I have, I can give you one more thing. I can give you this creature, which is called the cow . . . - God showed man the idea of the cattle, and the cattle were magnificent. They were in every way exactly what the monyjang would want. The man and woman thanked God for such a gift, because they knew that the cattle would bring them milk and meat and prosperity of every kind. But God was not finished. . . . - God said, “You can either have these cattle, as my gift to you, or you can have the What.” . . . - “What is the What?” the first man asked. And God said to the man, “I cannot tell you. Still, you have to choose between the cattle and the What.” Well then. The man and the woman could see the cattle right there in front of them, and they knew that with cattle they would eat and live with great contentment. They could 99    see the cattle were God’s most perfect creation, and that the cattle carried something godlike within themselves. They knew that they would live in peace with the cattle, and that if they helped the cattle eat and drink, the cattle would give man their milk, would multiply every year and keep the monyjang happy and healthy. So the first man and woman knew they would be fools to pass up the cattle for this idea of What. So the man chose cattle. And God has proven that this was the correct decision. God was testing the man. He was testing the man, to see if he could appreciate what he had been given, if he could take pleasure in the bounty before him, rather than trade it for the unknown. (61-2) There are two endings to this parable: to the Arabs, “[n]o one knows” (63) what the What is. To the Dinka and to Valentino, “God had given the What to the Arabs, and this is why the Arabs were inferior” (63). From the parable itself, we can see that “What” is neither agricultural nor pastoral, because it stands in opposition to the symbol of the “cattle” that was given to the Dinka. The refugee Dinka who fled his homeland has fallen away from the agricultural lifestyle he is used to and finds himself relocated into urban Atlanta, where one “shouldn’t open [one’s] door to strangers” (5). In this strange and hostile land, the What is perceived to be the very different culture of hostility and materialism that is missing from the farming lifestyle that Valentino was born into. The materialistic lifestyle that Valentino is relocated into, one of “a television, a VCR, a microwave, an alarm clock, many other conveniences” (5), becomes a marker of falling away from the simple cattle lifestyle. Because the Dinkas have fallen away, injustices towards these refugees become justifiable. The refugees did not have wealth in the first place. It was 100    given to them by rich Americans like the “Peachtree United Methodist Church” (5) and so, it can once again be taken by other Americans. The seemingly small-time robbery – two robbers take most of Valentino’s belongings without severely hurting him – becomes a stain on the host society. The small-time robbery also reminds readers of a much larger robbery by other people who also had the “What” – the Arabs stole from Valentino his family and homeland; they also stole from many other Sudanese. The continuation of the parable shows this effect: God had given the What to the Arabs, and this was why the Arabs were inferior. . . . God had given the Dinka superior land, fertile and rich, and had given them cattle, and though it was unfair, that was how God had intended it and there was no changing it. The Arabs lived in the desert, without water or arable soil, and thus seeking to have some of God’s bounty, they had to steal their cattle and then graze them in Dinkaland. They were very bad herdsmen, the Arabs were, and because they didn’t understand the value of cattle, they only butchered them. They were confused people, my father often told me, hopeless in many ways. [63] However, if we are to simply leave the reading of the “What” parable at this stage, we will have only received a one-sided version of the story in which the cows that the Dinkas received triumphed over the What that the Arabs had. Thousands of years later, after the distribution in the parable, many Sudanese villages were wiped out by Arab raiders. The novel is too canny to present a direct political stance in a complex history of politics and violence. The moral it offers up is this: 101    - What? You’ll see us. The only way you’ll see us is if you get to the United States. Come back a successful man. - But father, what – - Yes, the What. Right. Get it. This is it. Go. I am your father and I forbid you to come to [Marial Bai] – (513) In a telephone conversation that Valentino has with his father much later on after they were separated in the civil war, his father insists that Valentino has to go to America to get a share of the “What” that the Arabs – and the Americans – had. The cattle have failed and now the Dinka, robbed of their rightful portion, need to take from the Arabs in order to thrive. Only then can the Sudanese return to rebuild their land. To this ideal end, the VAD Foundation is one step in the right direction, with its mission in “[h]elping members of the southern Sudanese diaspora in the United States,” “[r]ebuilding southern Sudanese communities through the implementation of community-driven development projects that increase access to educational opportunities for children, women, and men” and “[i]mproving U.S. policy toward Sudan by educating the public and policy makers on the situation in Sudan” (“Mission Statement”). Valentino has learnt the ways of nonDinkas and he has published a novel that can raise awareness on the Sudanese conflict. On this level, Eggers’s novel functions not just as a work of literature. It is a book of renewal in its ability to empower the refugee experience to remark, in dialogue with other stories, upon the failings of the international community and the overflow of refugees. This transformation of literature into a tool for social and political change is possible only through the reappropriation of what literature can do as well as how a novel 102    can function as a parody of political documents and autobiographies. As Michael Fischer puts it in “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory,” recognising the role models of refugees is “an insistence on a pluralist, multidimensional, or multifaceted concept of self: one can be many different things, and this personal sense can be a crucible for a wider social ethos of pluralism” (196). While Fischer is writing about ethnicities, ethnicities arise out of groups of people, one of which is refugees. Like how each and every one of us are distributed to our respective ethnicity by the draw of luck at birth, refugees have just as little say in their status as refugees. No one chooses to become a refugee and it is the forceful displacement of these people from their places of residence that defines their lives. When they transform their concept of self as Valentino does in What is the What, they call for a plural society that accepts these refugees not as aliens but as an aspect of itself. Thus, when both the “primary” and “secondary” sets of meaning are brought next to each other, readers are able to access Valentino’s experiences as Eggers facilitates the communication between Valentino and the readers for a unique story that cannot be achieved otherwise. This is also why the novelautobiography form works for What is the What, because the book draws from the conventional autobiography and the traditional novel, combining both forms to serve the purpose of capturing the attention of readers to hear and understand what Eggers and Valentino have to say. Chapter 6: Conclusion The refugee should be considered for what he is, that is, nothing less than a border concept that radically calls into question the principles of the nation-state and, at 103    the same time, helps clear the field for a no-longer-delayable renewal of categories. (Agamben 117) This anomaly in literature – the border story that is central to history and society – that is the refugee work of art allows the refugee to be recognized and individualized. In the process of doing so, the speaking refugee becomes the renewed participant in an international community and a marker of refuge. In this struggle to make life worthy of being a human being, the refugees reclaim themselves from being less than human beings to becoming human beings who can shape history. They become the storytellers who provide an insistent alternative voice in a century crowded with warfare and political strife. They are, as Arendt describes, the “few refugees who insist upon telling the truth, even to the point of “indecency,” get in exchange for their unpopularity one priceless advantage: history is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privileged of Gentiles” (“We” 119). They are as Valentino is – a refugee whom people cannot pretend he does not exist because he has “[filled] the air with [refugees’] words” (535). Finally, let us return to Iser, who quotes Henry James to say, “The success of a work of art . . . may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life – that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience” (954). 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 also 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. 104    Works Cited “About Dave Eggers.” Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. McSweeney’s, n.d. Web. 1 Aug. 2012. “About Iraqi Refugee Stories.” Iraqi Refugee Stories. Jennifer Utz, n.d. Web. 1 Jan. 2012. Agamben, Giorgio. “We Refugees.” Symposium 49.2 (1995): 114-9. Trans. Michael Rocke. Expanded Academic ASAP. 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Web. 3 Jan. 2012. [...]... works with, the cover illustrations of the resultant book, the marketing managers who decide when and how to circulate copies of the book – all these factors shape the public reception of what a refugee has to say Moreover, sometimes, the refugee is not the writer or co-writer of the literary work we call refugee literature All the people involved in the process of creating a book filter the experience... the What These case studies will explore the various strategies of fictionality that are employed in the works of fiction to suggest that the refugee identity is greatly enriched by retellings through the framework of fiction Chapter 3: What is Refugee Literature? Listening to the Refugee Speak: Difficulties of Representation All kinds of refugee works have permeated the English -reading public As these... audience All of the examples, with their focus on refugee experiences, revolve around the figure of the refugee, a figure that occupies the peripheries of fiction and representation elsewhere in other literature 25    The importance of understanding the refugee experience cannot be overemphasized We live in a world where refugee numbers are increasing constantly A direct consequence is that many refugees... 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... detail as a work of refugee literature, but, suffice to say for the moment, it is yet another example of refugee literature that has permeated public consciousness There are many other such examples, including Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, Katherine Paterson’s The Day of the Pelican, Mary Williams’s Brothers in Hope: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Ishmael Beah’s... Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, and Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s I, Rigoberta Menchú, An Indian Woman in Guatemala The audiences that these different works of literature reach point towards a burgeoning awareness of the widespread problem of refugees worldwide From the widely televised collapse of the New York Twin Towers which sparked off the war on terror to the newspaper reports on the outpouring of refugees... 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. .. “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... show, there is an increasing amount of refugee literature and other works 23    of fiction which are all produced in this past decade Such literature reaches out to a wide range of audiences and indicates the extent to which refugee issues have filtered into our everyday lives One type of literature – literature produced by the UNHCR – attempts to educate the public on refugee issues In 2007, the Public... 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 ... 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. .. act of fictionalizing The successful texts 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... whether the claim to refugee status is a legitimate one The mass media then adds to the shaping of refugees in the public sphere, figuring the refugee for a specific report or purpose In the