Reimagining Refugee Encounters in The Displaced

In refugee discourses, though much has been discussed at the levels of humanitarianism, law, geopolitics and sociology, refugee voices (interviews, testimonies, memoirs, etc.) as well as scholarship on them are largely missing.1While historian Dan Stone calls for a more active presence of refugees in these studies, instead of taking refugees as 'a pre-existing category' in relation to present-day concerns (103), Nando Sigona elucidates the public confines imposed on refugees in asserting their subjectivities with respect to credibility (that they are widely deemed 'bogus' necessitates careful assessment and Western experts' corroboration) and social expectation of 'pure' victimhood, echoing Spivak's question on the potency of the subaltern voices.Furthermore, Sigona offers a literature review of how refugees have been (mis)represented in a fetishized (dehistoricized and depoliticized) and pathologized (dependent and vulnerable) manner in Western mass media, so as to deny their political agency and conceal the real causes of their forced migration, which often relate to wars waged by the Western countries.The ways in which these portrayals of refugees are ideologically constructed and the intended effects will be examined later.In addition, the heterogeneity within the refugee subjects -'there are a thousand multifarious refugee experiences' (Soguk 4) -which might lead to the (self-)questioning of the authenticity or representativeness of refugee stories, and ethical risks involved in appropriating refugee positions, pertaining to both nonfictional/memorial and fictional writings, could inhibit the creative force informed by refugee experiences, in intervening in 'the international order of things' (Malkki).1 For example, in The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (2014), 'literature' or memory studies is not among the nine major approaches (history, law, political theory, anthropology, etc.) outlined in the contents.Amidst 53 chapters, only chapter 29 "The Politics of Refugee Voices" is partially relevant.This paper aims to address the aforementioned problematics by showcasing the plurality and diversity of refugee reality in The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (2018), an edited collection by Viet Thanh Nguyen, consisting of 17 short memoirs narrated by refugee writers worldwide, based on their own refugee experiences.2 The multiplicity of refugee voices is achieved in this book without relativizing or prioritizing any specific experience, which demonstrates what Michael Rothberg terms a 'multidirectional memory', drawing on connections from colonial and Holocaust discourses, which entails 'cross-referencing', 'borrowing', and productive 'interaction of different collective memories' (3).Although refugee writers in Displaced each tell their own story, who also speak to a larger group that embark on the same routes (Afghanistan to America, Soviet Union to Canada, Ethiopia to Germany, etc.), their experiences are in dialogues and solidarity, while they also recognize the particular encounters different groups and individuals are subjected to, which will be further substantiated in this paper.Individually and collectively, their writings disrupt and challenge the normative script of refugee imagination, which will be analyzed in arguing for the potential transformative power of memoirs and story-telling in refugee studies.Before delving into the text, this paper will first critically scrutinize the very notion of refugee authorship and its stakes.In response to the possibility of subaltern agency, Spivak suggests that 'the subaltern cannot speak' in the sense that she is unable to be heard; one ceases to be subaltern in making oneself heard (The Spivak Reader 292;(5)(6).3 In contrast, Nguyen prefaces Displaced with the awareness of this seeming contradiction: 'I was once a refugee4 , although no one would mistake me for being a refugee nowI insist on being called a refugeeIt would be so much easier to call myself an immigrant, to pass myself off as belonging to a category of migratory humanity that is less controversial, less demanding, and less threatening than the refugee' (7).His insistence on keeping the refugee identity complicates Spivak's claim through proposing 2 Except in 'God's Fate', Alexksandar Hermon tells the story of one of his fellow Bosnian refugees Kemal Frato. 3Gramsci is referenced as an organic intellectual emerged from a subaltern position and speaks for them, whose status as a subaltern would be changed utterly (6). 4 Nguyen fled from Vietnam to America at the age of four.

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