Photograph by Gabriele Stabile
Refugees: what do they go through to switch countries?
If you’ve been following my recent poems, you probably know I’m curious about this already as I’ve been exploring, through poetry, my father’s teenage move from the Middle East to the East Coast of the United States. Over the holidays, I had the chance to mentor a young woman who had partly “grown up” in a refugee camp, and again I considered the severity of such a move.
And more recently still, I’ve been looking at and reading a new book called Refugee Hotel, published by McSweeney’s. Photographer Gabriele Stabile began his study of refugee experiences with an Ethiopian family that arrived in New York in 2007. He captured their first night, and became fascinated with the subject. Stabile and reporter Juliet Linderman have created a visual flipbook, with oral histories, of what resettlement is like.
Many refugees’ first night in a new country is in a hotel by the airport. Not pretty, not soft. Stabile’s subjects have left behind their homes in Burundi, Iraq, Burma, Somalia, Bhutan and Ethiopia. How do they feel? How would you feel?
Here’s what Sudanese refugee Felix Lohitai says at the start of his oral history: “There is some confusion as to when I was born. 1964 was my year of birth, but refugees coming here don’t have birth certificates because everything is lost. Everyone now says the first of January is our date of birth…”
What would it be like to be pushed into a new place, to try to assimiliate when everything is different? If you know someone (a relative, perhaps) that emigrated to this country, try (through your writing) to capture his or her tentativeness, the fear, maybe even the determination.
Write a persona piece (in the voice of the refugee) about anyone, real or imagined, and their first days and weeks in a new community.
“Describe for me, please, the country you had to leave.”
Her voice was warm and restrained. It made me think of a breeze trapped in the thin colorful jalabiyas we women hung to dry on the low branches of the acacia.
I began to speak. “Each piece of dirt had its own national smell. There were so many people passing over it, it picked up the languages and became lodged in our skin. It is hard to describe because none of the languages spoken had ever encountered such weaponry, such horror, as the wars that beset us. Suddenness had seized the languid pace of our days. Instantaneous bloodletting, shrieking of women raped. We whispered among ourselves to keep living, so our deaths would not serve their amusement. Where we began our days with the birth red ruby of the sunrise, and ended with the dusty lavender of repose, the soldiers came and stole our sun, giving us flourescent lights and the brown blood soaking through our bandages, staining our skin. Our proud and beautiful men were no longer there to protect us, and we had to leave our beautiful homes made of ancient stone and plaster, we had to leave our pictures, our heirlooms. They shot our dogs. Our husbands are gone. Our children taken by the army. Perhaps it was one of our neighbors’ children who shot at us. They left people lying there on the dirt. But the dirt that rises in orange dust with our footsteps does not rise any longer. The country I came from? It stopped existing, and it is owned now by entropy.”
“And do you know yet where you are going?”
“No.”
But I do know, yet cannot tell it in her language. I am going to join the black ribbon of my people. I am going to be that strong thread that keeps it from falling apart. The ribbon twists now, like a dying river in its bed, but we will join and gleam in the sun, many colors, many voices.
I’d say that you’ve had a productive writing day, Amelia. The line “ended with the dusty lavender of repose, the soldiers came and stole our sun” must have been mulling around somewhere deep inside because it is nearly TOO good to have emerged fully formed. Wonderful job. I’m glad the prompt took you someplace so different from where you are.
Thank you Lauren for launching the journey. I once had a “memory” several centuries old of being a child camped with my tribe outside a fortress. It must have been long ago because we were Celtic but nomadic, near the Bosporus. I clung to my old mother’s or grandmother’s wrinkled, colorful shirt for the comfort of her soft bosom, and remember the smell of rosemary and poultry simmering in a pot over a fire. It was my cooking that brought me there. I wonder if your father has childhood memories evoked by smells?
I’ve been thinking a lot about your question, Amelia. I know my father has strong memories evoked by foods, but it is very difficult to find the laborious dishes that my grandmother prepared. Since he and I live in different states, it is even harder to share that discovery.
Memories are evoked by all the senses: a cloth, a smell, a pot, a photograph. So many things could elicit a response you didn’t even know was still there. I love that about memory – how elusive, and yet how available it is.