For our last formal reading this semester (before we get to the good stuff – your papers!) we are tucking into Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, which he wrote while detained on Manus Island using a smuggled phone and by texting out his story, one WhatsApp message at a time. It is a remarkable work, described by some as falling into a rich tradition of prison literature.

Originally written in Persian, No Friend but the Mountains tells of Boochani’s departure from Iran, his travails in Indonesia and, ultimately, his arrival in Australia. He arrived in 2013, four days after the government of Australia re-imagined its political and territorial boundaries so that refugees arriving on Christmas Island, as Boochani did, would not be able to claim refugee status. The so-called Pacific Solution advanced by John Howard and his government drew widespread criticism but remained in place for years.  

In No Friend but the Mountains, Boochani provides an account of his journey and of his time on Manus Island. He describes a Kyriarchal system in which different forms of oppression combine to dehumanize the prisoners.

Boochani has become the voice for many refugees who are unable to speak for themselves, or more to the point, do not have access to outlets where they can be heard. He is currently in New Zealand on an expired tourist visa and it is unclear what the future holds for him though he has received widespread attention and acclaim for his book and film, Chauka, please tell us the time.

As you read the assigned excerpts from Boochani’s book, consider and provide your thoughts on the following question: In what ways does No Friend but the Mountains reinforce, or challenges, ideas about refugees as victims? Answer by providing reference to a specific passage from the excerpts you are reading.

To start, I will tell you that one of the passages that stayed with me from my reading of the book as a whole is this passage:

(60) “Men are sitting all over the deck of this boat, each carrying their unknown past, each one a survivor of a perilous journey, each now part of this gathering.”

It reminds me how hard it is to know or understand the individual life stories, and trajectories, of anyone we meet and that this personalized humanity is even harder to access in stories of refugees. People might be victimized, or feel themselves victims, at certain moments in time but they are also so much more. Always.

I wasn’t initially going to assign Sonia Nozario’s Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother (Random House, 2007) but it caught my eye at some point last summer. I don’t even remember where I saw the reference but I was intrigued because there has been so much discussion under the Trump Administration about “illegal migration”. As the administration has become more publicly aggressive about its efforts to deter (most notably with the extended construction of a border wall between Mexico and the United States), critics have pushed back. For instance, there has been a great deal of public criticism around the detention, and specifically, the caging of children. The idea behind such policies is to deter potential migrants and dehumanize current migrants to ensure public support for enforcement actions at the US – Mexico border. As critics have noted, moreover, the immigration detention system in the United States is a multi-million dollar (closer to a billion dollars) industry annually. People profit materially from this work.

According to a recent study by the Council of Foreign Relations in the United States, “Immigration authorities apprehended a record-setting 76,020 unaccompanied minors at or near the U.S.-Mexico border during the 2019 fiscal year, an increase of 52 percent over 2018.” The issue of child migration, and specifically unaccompanied minors, remains a critical public policy issue, and a pressing moral and ethical one as well.  

Given what an important issue this is currently, I thought it would be a good opportunity to dig a little deeper into the history of this topic and the reasons why people, including youth, are making the perilous journey from Central America, through Mexico, and on to the United States. Exploring this topic will let us think more about the murky divide between migrants and refugees and query, again, the limited nature of legal definitions of refuge. More importantly, Enrique’s Journey, will give us a chance to think about the conditions for migrants in their home countries or so-called countries of origins. What causes people to leave?

In Enrique’s Journey, Sonia Nazario, goes to Honduras and follows the journey the migrant trail north, through Mexico and into the United States. The book is based on a series of articles Nazario wrote for the Los Angeles Times, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize (and a reminder of what Viet Than Nguyen said about winning the Pulitzer Prize for his work, it’s a big deal and it means that people read your work more as a result). Enrique’s Journey is a best-selling work that has been widely praised. People can’t claim ignorance about the situation in Central America after reading this work and yet despite a great of activism, migrants are still scapegoated on a daily basis in the United States and the Trump Administration pursues its aggressive enforcement activities with determination, most recently severely restricting visas for travelers and potential migrants from Eritrea, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania.

Enrique’s Journey is an absolutely grim story and I often had to put the book down, which is why I only assigned parts of the book. Even at that, there are accounts of deep violence, including gendered violence against women travelers. Enrique’s Journey is a powerful account of migrant experiences, and one deserving of a critical audience such as yourselves.

Your blog assignment this week is somewhat different in that I am asking you to transcribe a short passage from the book in which you learn something new. Your next step is then explain how this particular passage changes or amplifies your current worldview. It might be a statistic or a story, either both are okay. For instance, on page 61, Nazario writes, “This is Enrique’s eighth attempt to reach El Norte.” I was struck by this sentence because of the high number. Eight is a lot of perilous journeys to undertake. I wondered what it said about the conditions in Honduras, the established migration routes and Enrique’s determination. These are all important facets of a story that too often begins only with the attempted arrival of migrants at the US-Mexico border. It is a story that too often ignores what happens when people return. Yet just this week, Human Rights Watch released a report indicating that 138 Salvadorans were murdered between 2013 to 2019 following their return from the United States. 70 others were abused.

Remember though that this exercise shouldn’t take up all of your time so please aim for a reflection (passage, with page reference# and explanation) that is in the 300-word range.

After a really productive few weeks considering the history of refugees via film, we are shifting course slightly to consider the history of refugees in literature (fiction and non-fiction). In reading texts by refugees and journalists the goal of this theme is to learn not only about historical and contemporary events involving refugees but about the ways that refugees and their experiences are represented in text. We will therefore be thinking a great deal about metaphor and symbolism.

To start us off, we will be reading excerpts from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees (2017). Nguyen is an accomplished writer and academic who gained prominence with his novel The Sympathizer (2015) in which he portrayed the twisting life of a North Vietnamese man who works as an informant on the South Vietnamese community, even after moving to the United States. Nguyen was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for this work that captured the imagination of American audiences.

With The Refugees, Nguyen returns to the subject of Indochinese refugees and their experiences but does so in short vignettes. For class, you will be reading four stories: Epigraph, The Transplant, The Americans, Fatherland.

As you read, think about the following questions: What is the point of each story? What does each story tell you about refugee experiences? What does each story tell you about Nguyen’s perception of America?

Remember that Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1971 (his parents moved from communist-controlled North Vietnam to South Vietnam after the country was divided in 1954). His parents fled Vietnam after the Americans were defeated in 1975 and the communists took control of the country. They were resettled to the United States.

In your comments for this week, briefly summarize the epigraph and the three stories by addressing the questions raised above.

Over the next two weeks we are going to be digging deeply into contemporary refugee crises with two films Fuoccomare (Fire at Sea) and I want to Live (2017, about the Syrian refugee crisis).

Fuoccomare is a 2016 Italian documentary about Lampedusa Island, a beautiful Sicilian island in the Mediterranean, a long-standing and very popular tourist destination and a place, which in recent years, has become known as the “Gateway to Europe” as people fleeing conflict in North Africa and other regions have arrived on the island seeking refuge. Lampedusa was a key point of arrival during the so called migrant crisis, which peaked in 2015 and was characterized by large numbers of refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

Many people arrived from Libya, a key departure point for Europe from Africa. Some of the arrivals included Libyan nationals fleeing the 2011 Libyan Civil War (waged between the regime of Muammar Gaddafi and opponents, organized under the National Transitional Council). Gaddafi was deposed and killed in October 2011 but unresolved issues led to a second civil war in 2014, ongoing. There were an estimated 1 million Libyan refugees by 2011 though many returned home following the end of the conflict and the UNHCR estimated approximately 5,000 Libyan refugees abroad and 59,000 by 2013. With the start of the second civil war, refugees once again sought refuge in neighbouring Tunisia as well as Europe. Yet passage through and from Libya is extremely precarious. A warning in bold letters on the UNHCR’s website currently warns about conditions in Libya.

At the same time that conditions in Libya have deteriorated, European states have sought to return refugees to Libya.  

The documentary Fuoccomare seeks to capture these tensions by tracing the recent history of arrivals from North Africa alongside the daily life of villagers on the island. In some ways, Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow is very evocative of Fuoccomare and so as you are watching this film, you will want to think about similarities and differences in emphasis and narrative.

For class on Monday, you will be reading “Migration, tourism and peace: Lampedusa as a social laboratory” by Marxiano Melottia , Elisabetta Ruspinib and Ezio Marrab. Much like the film, the authors are interested in understanding how the so-called migrant crisis in Europe has impacted the local community on Lampedusa. The focus of their article is an exhibit called “Towards a Museum of Trust and Dialogue for the Mediterranean,” which featured works such as Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid.

As we have discussed in class, films and literature (and exhibits) are often intended to raise awareness about refugees and their situations. The authors discuss the exhibit in detail. As you read the article, consider the following questions:

1) According to the authors, what is the intent behind the exhibit? (Be as specific as possible and remember to use direct evidence from the text)

2) Based on your knowledge of the history of refugees, and our most recent engagement with issues around narratives and representations of and about refugees, what benefits or drawbacks can you envision for an exhibit such as “Towards a Museum of Trust and Dialogue for the Mediterranean”?

I look forward to reading your comments!

The 1994 Rwandan Genocide took place over a period of 100 days when Hutu extremists and armed Hutu militias attacked and murdered members of the dominant Tutsi minority in the country. An estimated 800,000 people were killed between 7 April and 15 July 1994. Refugees fled the country as early as April 1994. When the attacks were halted in the summer of 1994 with the military victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, two million Hutu refugees fled the country, many to neighbouring Zaire (known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1997), fearing retributions. Thousands of Rwandan refugees came to Canada, many to Quebec as a result of their fluency in French (as a result of being colonized by Belgium in 1916). Important oral history work has been undertaken the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University to tell their story.

The impact of the Rwandan Genocide had deep reverberations on the countries in the west (or Global North, depending on what phrasing you want to use). It led to more aggressive peacekeeping by the UN and NATO in the Balkans two years later as political leaders recognized that they had failed to act, despite warnings from UN officials on the ground, including Canadian General Romeo Dallaire who warned of a potential genocide in 11 January 1994 and appealed for the establishment of a robust UN force that would stop the massacres of threatened people, particularly in Kigali.”

Observers blamed racism and a failed peacekeeping mission in Somalia in 1993 for part of the inaction, a mission in which US military members were attacked and killed (following the failed Blackhawk Down mission) and in which Canadian peacekeepers tortured and killed Shidane Abukar Arone, a Somalian teenager. Then US President Bill Clinton has expressed regret for the way his government failed to respond to the Rwandan Genocide, saying that he didn’t “fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which [Rwandans] were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”

Given the overwhelming failure of humanitarian efforts in the context of the Rwandan Genocide, stories of bravery and courage stand out. One such case is that of Paul Rusesabagina, Hutu, who was a house manager at the Hôtel des Milles Collines in Kigali at the time the genocide broke out.

He hid and protected 1,268 Hutu and Tutsi refugees attacked during the genocide. His story, much like that of Oskar Schindler’s rescue efforts in the context of the Holocaust, has been widely celebrated in the west (most famously in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List). As you will see, his story is the inspiration for the 2004 film, Hotel Rwanda, in which he is portrayed by actor Don Cheadle (the two are pictured below).

We will be screening Hotel Rwanda in class next week. In advance of the screening, you are reading “Genocide, Human Rights, and the Politics of Memorialization: “Hotel Rwanda” and Africa’s World War” by Jonathan Glover. In the article, Glover argues that because the film is focused on raising awareness about the genocide, it leads to the mistaken impression that everything in Rwanda is okay after 1994. He notes, “By participating in a mythology of the genocide that supports the RPF’s (Rwandan Patriotic Front led by Paul Kagame) official narrative of events, Hotel Rwanda conceals ongoing human rights abuses even as it seeks to reveal the atrocities of 1994.” (96) In other words, Kagame is worried about the political implications of commemorating the Rwandan genocide in a way that simplifies a very complex history of colonialism, race, and ongoing power struggles and post-Genocide politics.

As you read the article, identify ONE sentence where Glover spells out his concerns and explain how you will consider these concerns as you watch the film. Blog posts are due before Monday’s class.

To start this semester, we will continue our exploration of refugees and film with a very recent production, Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow (2017).

Ai Weiwei is an acclaimed artist and filmmaker who is perhaps best known to the general public for his collaboration with the architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron to design the famous bird’s nest stadium from the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Shortly thereafter, in 2011, he was arrested on the charge of tax evasion, online dissemination of pornography and bigamy and held under house arrest. Given Ai Weiwei’s high profile, the arrest came as a surprise and many observers suspected that his persecution was the result of his outspoken criticism leveled at the government of the People’s Republic of China. Since 2015, he has lived in exile in Berlin.

In 2017, Ai Weiwei worked with Participant Media and AC Films to produce the documentary Human Flow, of which you are watching the first 90 minutes this week (and we’ll finish the rest on Wednesday).

On the making of the film, Ai Weiwei has said, “Human Flow is a personal journey, an attempt to understand the conditions of humanity in our days. The film is made with deep beliefs in the value of human rights. In this time of uncertainty, we need more tolerance, compassion and trust for each other since we all are one. Otherwise, humanity will face an even bigger crisis.”

The film was made over the course of one year in 23 different countries and is meant to raise awareness about human displacement on a global scale.

As you watch, please consider the following questions and answer ONE in your blog comment (to be uploaded before Wednesday’s class).

1. As with Terrace of the Sea (Diana Allan), water features prominently in Human Flow. In what ways is water important? In what ways does water shape our understandings of refugee experiences?

2.  How are the refugees depicted (e.g. individuals against white tent backdrops, in cemeteries, close-ups of children)? What are you meant to feel? How do these representations play into or advance particular stereotypes about refugees?

3. What historical context is missing? What would you like to know more about?

4. What images or passages did you find particularly evocative? Why?

5. Throughout the film, refugees are interacting with a range of people (including Ai Weiwei himself). How do these various interactions shape your perceptions of refugee experiences?

6. Ai Weiwei is very prominent in this documentary. He is shown filming refugees and interacting with refugees. What do you think his presence is meant to signify?

Edited: As follow up to our conversation yesterday, here are images of some of Ai Weiwei’s new art, which details the plight of refugees.

For more on this work, see: https://qz.com/quartzy/1233898/ai-weiwei-built-a-giant-inflatable-raft-crammed-with-hundreds-of-refugees and https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ai-weiwei-life-jackets-installation-berlin-427247.

Over the past few months there has been a great deal of discussion about Bill 21 in Quebec, a law that bans the wearing of religious symbols in public in the interest of secularization. As a number of critics have observed, the law disproportionately affects Muslim women and there is therefore a suspicion that the legislation is racially motivated as legislators from the Coalition Avenir Québec, the governing party, wrestle with questions of integration, assimilation and multiculturalism.

Underpinning much of these debates is the question of responsibility, a theme that we have touched upon over the course of the semester in different ways. What responsibilities do arriving migrants and refugees carry? And what responsibilities do citizens and states have in turn? Some of these responsibilities are legally mandated (e.g. “non-refoulement” in Article 33 of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees) but others are morally and culturally driven.

Related to the question of responsibility is the issue of where and how people move. Algeria was colonized by the French from 1830 until a violent war of independence ended colonial rule in 1962. Political and economic ties did not end there however and France is home to a large population of Algerians and their descendants who gravitated to the imperial metropole in search of economic opportunity and refuge during the colonial era and in subsequent decades, especially during periods of conflict in Algeria (e.g. civil war from 1991 to 2002). Linguistic affinity made France a natural destination and to some extent, the same is true of Quebec where the French language is valued among new immigrant populations (resulting in large populations of Haitians and North Africans in the province).

And so we have a situation where linguistic, economic and political ties render France and Quebec desirable in the eyes of many migrants, but that desirability is not always reciprocated as reflected in news stories about the North African population in Quebec and the challenges they have encountered around employment and religious differences.

As you read the article in The Nation on North African communities in Quebec, think about what challenges you can identify in terms of immigrant experiences in Quebec? Where do you see joy and benefits? And where does the sense of responsibility play out? Lots to think about as we build on this reading and our class discussion to think about how Algerian refugees in Quebec have been portrayed in popular media, including the critically-acclaimed film Monsieur Lazhar by director Philippe Falardeau.

[edited 25 November, p.m. based on class feedback]

We are incredibly fortunate this week that we will have the chance to chat with Dr. Diana Allan about the history of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and her 2009 film, Terrace of the Sea.

As context, it is important to keep in mind that Palestinian refugees now represent one of the most enduring refugee populations in the world and that since 1948 children and grand-children have been born refugees. Many have grown up their whole lives in refugee camps.

This map shows the moving borders since the state of Israel was created in 1948. As you can see there has been a great deal of territorial shifting:

Here are some key dates and figures to keep in mind:

•750,000 displaced or fled from their homes following the creation of the state of Israel

•350,000 more displaced or fled during 1967 Arab – Israeli War

•UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (1949)

•Current estimates of Palestinian refugees and their descendants at 5M •1.5 million in UNWRA camps

Dr. Allan will no doubt shed a great deal of light on the Palestinian experience in Lebanon, as she does in her film but in terms of the history of Palestinian refugees in that country specifically, here are some additional facts and figures to keep in mind.

• 300,000 in Lebanon, approximately 10% of the total population

• Do not have full citizenship rights, half live in camps

• 1982 Lebanon War (Israel invades in response to Palestine Liberation Organization attacks). For more information, the BBC has an interesting page http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7381364.stm.

• 1982: Sabra and Shatila massacre (est 3,500 fatalities)

• Thousands have been further displaced even while in exile in Lebanon

• May-September 2007 clashes between the Fatah al-Islam armed group and Lebanese armed forces at the Nahr al-Bared camp.

As you saw with the film, Terrace of the Sea, there is lots of history to think about here and lots of questions to consider about the nature of the Palestinian refugee experience in Lebanon. What questions did the film evoke for you? Did you have a question about a particular photograph? A sound effect? An oral history interview or perhaps a question about one of the Ibrahim family members that we encounter through the viewing. Share your thoughts here and we’ll get to ask Dr. Allan these and more on Wednesday.

Next week we’ll spend some time as a class looking at contemporary news coverage about refugees and forced migration and identifying where historical context might provide some useful insights. Often, news stories about refugees skim any mention of a larger historical connection and so our impressions of refugees, their experiences, and the idea of “crisis” can be quite superficial.

As an example, I pulled up an article from the New York Times, which appeared on 13 November 2019. Titled, “Factbox: Exiled in Mexico-Bolivia’s Morales Joins List of Famous Refugees,” it is ostensibly a historical overview of the history of political exiles in Mexico but I identified a number of instances where historical context was lacking.

I could take any one of the underlined passages, or speech bubbles, and write a history that would provide some much-needed context to this story. It’s what the seminar members will be doing next week and it should lead to a very lively discussion.

On 9 November 1989, thirty years ago this month, East Berliners learned that they would be able to cross into to West Berlin. It marked the beginning of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war in Europe.

The end of the cold war seemed to mark an era of increased mobility. As walls came down (physical and political), people moved from east to west (and in some cases in the opposite direction) in ways that they hadn’t been able to for almost forty years prior.

The post-Cold War era marked a fundamental transformation in how refugees and forced migrants were treated and perceived, and the kinds of histories they encountered as they moved. There was an era of apparent openness (and as a sidebar I highly recommend Tina Rosenberg’s award-winning work on the difficult histories that people encountered as Cod War-era archives and histories became publicly accessible).

But with increased mobility came increased challenges, especially as one of the guiding principles around refugee assistance (that of refugees from communism = good, others = relative ambivalence) disappeared with the end of the cold war.

This week, we are concluding our historiographical overview of the history of refugees and forced migration with two critical essays that consider the nature of refugee studies after the end of the cold war.

Specifically, we are looking at B.S. Chimni’s “The Geopolitics of Refugee Studies: A View From the South,” Journal of Refugee Studies 11(4) (1998): 350-373 and Anna Szörényi’s, “The images speak for themselves? Reading refugee coffee-table books,” Visual Studies 21(1) (2006): 24-41.

In your reflections, see if you can distill and synthesize the main critiques offered by Chimni and Szörényi and connect their concerns with some of the issues we have raised in previous weeks. You might also want to think about how their concerns might apply as we move forward and thinking about the histories of refugees and forced migrants as depicted in film and literature.