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The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights

Sophia A. McClennen, Alexandra Schultheis Moore

In Flight

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Eleni Coundouriotis
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7
IN FLIGHT
The Refugee Experience and Human Rights
Narrative

Eleni Coundouriotis

Whether they are ctional or real-life accounts, narratives that seek to capture the
experience of refugees are structured around a tension between mobility and stasis.
At stake in this tension are the identity of the refugee and the extent of autonomy and
agency accorded to her in the experience of displacement. Moreover, the tension
between mobility and stasis foregrounds the incommensurability of place and time
in such narratives. Whereas narrative exegesis generally draws the meaning of the
diachronic from its associations with specic settings, refugee narratives are structured
around a radical rupture of time from place. Such texts create a topos (or literary
invention of place) that occupies the diachronic alone. They create a moving space
that rehearses the experience of ight repeatedly. In this constant movement, the
refugee is portrayed as acting to save his life.
The story of ight is central to the imaginary of the refugee who needs to be able
to hold on to a sense of agency and of movement toward a destiny, however para-
doxical this may seem, given the precarity of the civilian in ight. Furthermore,
examining such narratives contributes to the broader project of sorting how human
rights concerns shape narrative form. Such linkage of human rights and narrative
requires that the reader look for the ways in which stories dramatize the claims to
human rights not only because their content might illustrate the reality of human
rights abuses, but because, by narrativizing the experience, the author creates a sub-
ject who persuasively stands for a rights claimant. Thus, human rights narratives
attempt to counter the dehumanization of rights abuse and the stories of refugees
compensate for their loss of agency.
The most dramatic stories of refugee experience are the stories of ight. As the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) explains, refugees have to
move if they are to save their lives or preserve their freedom (UNHCR 2014b). Yet the
consequences of ight often shape the political reality of refugee experience as one of
stasis. Stuck in camps, sometimes for generations, as we have seen with the experi-
ence of Palestinians expelled in 1948, refugees are marked by their loss of mobility
and autonomy and their struggle to circumvent these limitations (Peteet 2005: 99).

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Nonetheless, refugee narratives stories told about refugee experience invariably

emphasize the original story of ight rather than the story of immobility. Thus, in an
explanation of his collaboration with Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, Dave
Eggers (2007) talks about the challenges he faced in his attempt to ll out Dengs story
so that he could account not only for Dengs dramatic ights from his village and then
from camp to camp, but also for the much longer period Deng spent in the camps.
In Dengs oral accounting, whole years would be skipped because nothing of note
had happened (quoted in Dawes 2007: 209). The formal challenges of handling this
skewed relationship between narrative and real time determined, in part, Eggerss
choice to use ction rather than nonction and to devise an ingenuous overlaying of the
traumatic elements of Dengs experience of resettlement in the US with the tension
between the ight and immobility of his refugee experience in Africa (Eggers 2007).
The lack of balance in the narratives of refugee experience that tends to fore-
ground stories of ight provokes us to think about the purpose of these narratives
and the ways in which they construct the gure of the refugee. Hope is kept alive even
in the most desperate situations by holding on to an idea of a refugees autonomy
through the construction of her as a gure who can walk out from her circumstances
and toward a restored normalcy. Stories of ight oer an imagined return to the
experience of ight as a response to the humiliating conditions of refugee existence
in camps. An eloquent illustration of the yearning for movement is captured in this
photograph from the Zaatari camp for Syrian refugees in Jordan.
As we see here, the portrayal of the refugees is most dignifying if it shows them in
motion, on a clearly marked road that cuts through the camp. The mother and her
two children are moving toward the camera as if they will attain that other world
located beyond the camp, in the recesses behind and beyond the lens. Their gaze,

Figure 7.1 A Syrian refugee woman walks with her children at Zaatari Refugee Camp in
Mafraq, Jordan, Saturday, September 8, 2012 (AP Photo/Mohammad Hannon).
Used by permission of the Associated Press.

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turned slightly away from the camera, suggests this desire to circumvent the peri-
meter and get beyond it.
Propelled to move by events beyond the individuals control, the refugee in ight
confronts an unrelenting pressure to act and to make choices that determine the
chances to survive. A story that depicts an actor making such momentous decisions
and struggling contrasts sharply with the living-death motif of the experience of
entrapment in a camp, most memorably depicted by Primo Levi through the gures
of the musselmans, the men in decay (Levi 1996: 89). Furthermore, the refugee
narrative proposes ight not only as a narrative of duration over time, but as a spa-
tial construct that reveals the refugees resistance to the longer enduring condition of
stasis. Indeed, the narrative arc of a few paradigmatic stories of ight illustrates how
ight emerges as a narrative topos.
Marie Batrice Umutesis account of walking 2000 kilometers across Zaire in the
aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda captures the mental state of a refugee in
ight as a series of refusals vital to her survival. At the time of her stay at the camps
in Kivu, she reects:

A refugee suers, not only from having been torn from her land, her house,
her work and her country, but also from having to beg to survive. For
someone who has had work that allowed them to live decently, it is dicult
to accept someone else deciding for her what she should eat and how much. It
is even more dicult to spend the entire day sitting around with nothing to do
but wait for the distribution of aid. Feeling useless is the worst thing ima-
ginable. To forget their uselessness, the refugees threw themselves headlong
into drink and debauchery. Alcohol and sex became their major pastimes.
(Umutesi 2004: 8283)

Umutesi is one of the refugees in Kivu, but she clearly distances herself from the
condition of refugee as described here. It is they who feel useless and descend into
debauchery. Indeed, Michel Agier corroborates Umutesis impression when he
speaks generally of camps: the problem of idleness dominates life in the camps.
This problem, closely correlated to the feeling of abandonment, aects everyone, but
more directly those who had a recognized, more or less ocial, job before the
exodus (Agier 2002: 329). Elsewhere in her narrative, Umutesi is consistently
inclusive, representing Rwandans as we. At Tingi Tingi, for example, she speaks of
we who suered through Hell before humanitarian aid arrived at the camp
(Umutesi 2004: 143). What makes the passage above dierent, therefore, is that it
registers her refusal to succumb to the eects of uselessness. She tells us that it is
dicult to accept this loss of purposefulness. During the periods of stasis in the
camps, she begins to write: I made a habit of writing so that people could know and
break their silence, but also to stop my own pain. I often wept while I wrote, but
when I had nished I felt comforted (Umutesi 2004: 78). Her writing records the
stories of those who perished in the ight to Kivu: I described the suering of
Muhawe and the other children, who, like him, were starving and whose graves lined
the long road into exile (Umutesi 2004: 78). The comfort brought by writing comes
not only from memorializing the dead children. It also paradoxically derives from

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the power of the imagination to create that image of the long road into exile
marked by the series of childrens graves. Here the road is both a real place tragically
evoked and a narrative topos that captures the refugees capacity for struggle. Trapped
in the camp where she feels the paralysis of uselessness closing in on her, Umutesi
resists by holding in the imagination the tragic scenes of struggle on the road.
Furthermore, the impetus to break the silence and speak out leads her to activism in
the camps, most signicantly during her stay at Tingi Tingi (Umutesi 2004: 14748).
The experience of ight into the forest has traction as a story from which the
claim to the right to protection comes. As she ees from camp to camp, in and out
of the forest, Umutesi admits:

It was at times like this that I hated the international community, which had
abandoned us at the moment that we most needed them. They knew that
some of us had survived the rebels in the forest, but they seemed in no
hurry to come to our aid.
(2004: 145)

By addressing the international community, Umutesi speaks as a rights claimant on

behalf of herself and her community, knowing full well that such claims are made on
the basis of the story of ight. The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees
focuses on the displacement of the individual. The refugee is outside the country of
his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of
the protection of that country (UNHCR 2011). This condition of being outside
begs the question how come? and thus invites the telling of a story to ground the
refugees claim for protection. The importance of the story of ight goes even fur-
ther because it alone seems to have enduring power to hold at bay the dehumanizing
aspects of the refugee experience of dependence and the typological approach of
assigning homogenized identities to refugees (Malkki 2002: 357). To counter such
pressures, the UNHCR highlights stories of individual refugees on its website
(UNHCR 2014a).
Thus the story of ight grounds the claim for protection and, on the other hand,
functions to portray the refugee as an agent in her own survival. The climactic scene
of Umutesis narrative further deepens our sense that the refugee narrative is built
on a series of refusals that underpin her agency. During her ight from the camps at
Tingi Tingi, Umutesi encounters a girl dying by the side of the road. This gure of
the abject is shocking: with unseeing eyes wide open, excrement-stained clothing,
ies swarming around her, and insects crawling on her face (Umutesi 2004: 165), the
girl crystallizes for Umutesi the extent of the refugees abandonment by the interna-
tional community, provoking her to rail against the empty language of human rights
protections: the international community had abandoned us once again and let us
wander in the forest like wild beasts allow[ing] this young girl of sixteen to col-
lapse on the road like a dog, food for the ants of the equatorial forest (2004: 166).
Umutesi pours out her anger, an eloquent defense of the humanity of these subjects,
to contextualize her act of refusal which follows. From this point onward, she turns
away when she smells rotting esh (Umutesi 2004: 166) and thus uncouples
seeing from testimony. Shockingly she tells us: Afterwards I held my nose and

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looked to the other side until we had passed by (Umutesi 2004: 166). This is a
refusal of despair, a resistance to view the abject because it will destroy her, and a choice
to keep struggling and most clearly to keep moving, to stay on the road. It also signals
to the reader that the subject of her testimony will not be the graphic account of the
horror. The refusal to look at death is analogous to the refusal to accept the con-
dition of uselessness, and is also related to Umutesis other signicant refusals: the
refusal to marry or to create an alliance with a man who might protect her during
this historical crisis (2004: 2012, 220), and the refusal of repatriation to postgenocide
Rwanda where as a Hutu she feels unsafe (2004: 224). These refusals together show that
the refugee holds on to the prerogative of choosing a destiny.
Umutesi aims to recast the refugee story as a heroic story of war where the heroes
are not armed combatants but women and children eeing for their lives. Buchi
Emecheta laid the groundwork for such depiction of war in Destination Biafra where
womens war is the story of women heroically saving children while eeing from
combatants (Umutesi 2004: 206). Such recasting of a refugee story of victimization
into a story of action enables Umutesi, like Emecheta before her, to tell the stories
of the deaths of children in a way that stresses their personhood. The death of one of
her adopted children, Zuzu, which could have transpired similarly to the story of the
16 year old by the side of the road, reveals the collective eort to buck the inevitable.
Zuzu collapses several times by the side of the road and the group of children eeing
with Umutesi return to nd her, and carry her further, repeatedly defying the
odds that she will inevitably succumb. Umutesi refuses that inevitability to the last,
recounting Zuzus passing as [s]he [Zuzu] could do no more (Umutesi 2004: 193,
emphasis added).
In We Refugees, Hannah Arendt focuses on the ambivalence of such refusals.
Writing at a time after World War II when we see the historical emergence of the
refugee as an epistemic object (Malkki 2002: 357), Arendt says of German Jewish
refugees: If we are saved we feel humiliated, and if we are helped we feel degraded.
We ght like madmen for private existences with individual destinies (Arendt 1994:
114). The refusal of a collective destiny as refugees creates for Arendt ironies that
come close to a refusal of history. All the same, she lucidly identies the impulse of
the refugee to take on antithesis, to hold on to the idea of an individual destiny even
when it seems almost to require distorting the past: in order to build a new life, one
has rst to improve on the old one (Arendt 1994: 114). Having lost everything and
starting anew, the refugee continuously bucks her invisibility (Arendt 1994: 115).
A refugee dreams of arrival: arrival to a safe place where a future might be possible.
The achievement of such arrival is fraught with danger because the end of the journey is
inevitably anticlimactic and full of its own challenges, as we see in Eggerss account
of Dengs resettlement.
If the texts by Umutesi, Emecheta, and Eggers recount ight away from the imminent
danger of armed conict, Ghassan Kanafanis Men in the Sun (1978) provides an alter-
native narrative arc to the story that resists the dehumanization of the camp experience.
Ten years after the nakbah, or catastrophe of Palestinian expulsions, three men (Abu
Qais, Assad, and Marwan) decide independently of each other to ee from the
camps across Iraq and into Kuwait. As Abu Qais tells himself: In the last ten years
you have done nothing but wait. You have needed ten big hungry years to be

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convinced that you have lost your trees, your house, your youth, and your whole
village (Kanafani 1978: 13). Psychic survival requires a ight towards a destination
that holds the promise of a life resembling normal. It is a tenuous promise: If I
arrive. If I arrive, as Abu Qais notes (Kanafani 1978: 14). Memory, Kanafani shows
us, motivates survival during the journey. As his narrator proles each of the three
men, he tells us what they lost in the nakbah, who they were before, and who they
become after. Ten years and the temporary refugee has no end in sight, pushing each
of these men to propel himself of his own will into ight a second time. The three
stories become one on the Iraq/Kuwait border as the men negotiate their passage
into Kuwait, coincidentally agreeing on the same smuggler, another Palestinian, Abul
Khaizuran. Thus the men forge a collective destiny in the hands of their smuggler.
Kanafani renders Abul Khaizuran a symbol of Palestines wounded national pride
that is left with little but delusional scenaria for its restoration. A Palestinian ghter
who suered a castrating wound in the conict, and who refuses to accept his lost
manhood and will not admit it openly, Abul Khaizuran promises improbably to
ferry the three men in his water truck, placing them inside the trucks empty tank
where the men succumb to the extreme heat.
The improbability of the plans success and Abul Khaizurans ability to sell it
regardless foregrounds the desperation of the group and opens up the question of
the refugees exploitation by a fellow Palestinian. Yet the answer to this question is
not simple. Kanafani makes evident that the magnitude of Abul Khaizurans trauma
makes him more like, than unlike, the refugees. He too ed, in his case the hospital
where he was being treated for his unbearable wound, and we learn: It was as
though his ight could bring things back to normal again (Kanafani 1978: 38). Flight
is hope, and he knows how to convince the others to hope in him. The refugees
trust in him brings the situation as close to normal again as possible before the
plan nally unravels due to the inevitable vicissitudes of journeys: too many small
delays and unbearable heat takes the refugees beyond what can be endured.
Kanafani doubles the narration of the journey across the border. We see the
journey of the truck driver, whereas we are left to imagine the journey of the men
inside the tank from whom we get silence. The storys focalization does not follow
the men into the space of their suering. There in the dark and overwhelming heat,
where they are tossed around by the uneven pavement and have no place to hold
onto in the rounded walls of the tank, they have entered a kind of con or space of
death. Despite taking on agency (escaping the camp), they voluntarily surrender it to
the smuggler and his plan. Their initial misgivings about the smugglers intentions turn
out to be misplaced. He is sincere in his promise to deliver them to Kuwait. Yet the
plan entails a surrender to an unlivable space, with death almost a certainty. Such
passages have repeatedly occurred historically. In 1999, two Guinean teenagers who
sought passage in the cargo hold of a Sabena airplane perished in that unlivable
space in a case that was a catalyst for scholarly discussion of the plight of migrants.
Didier Fassin commented on the poignant letter found with the kids in which they
ask for Europes hospitality in terms that articulate perfectly the humanitarian logic
of responsiveness to suering (Fassin 2012: 256). No such poignant words are ima-
gined by Kanafani. The closing lines of the story repeat Abul Khaizurans question
to the dead men: why didnt you knock on the walls of the tank? (Kanafani 1978:

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56). His expectation that it is the mens responsibility to break out of the silenced
space to which his plan assigned them is a form of blaming the victim that reveals his
failure to see his own story as similar to theirs.
The ending of Kanafanis novel belongs not with humanitarian discourse but with
political discourse. Abul Khaizuran is trying to compensate for his maimed manhood
by making lots of money. His greed leads him to hatch a risky plan and ultimately to
betray his fellow Palestinians. By placing Palestinians in a relation of greed and betrayal,
Kanafani suggests a national allegory that ties the fate of continued statelessness to an
impotent nationalism. The impasse is most appalling when Abul Khaizuran dumps
the bodies of the three men near a rubbish heap, more out of sheer exhaustion than
indierence. Kanafanis story thus opens itself to an allegorical reading about Palestinians
nationalist aspirations, and claries the dierence between the two narrative arcs of the
story of ight. Flight from conict constructs a heroic refugee as an individualized
gure, whereas ight out of the stasis of camp life propels the refugee towards suicide.
The refugee is seen as the gure who breaks away from the potentially radicalizing
collective identity of the camp, an identity in the making with less appeal than the
enticing promise of normal life symbolized by Kuwait.
The space inside the tank to which the men voluntarily conne themselves evokes
other methods of transportation that dangerously conne and incapacitate the refugee,
such as the plane in the case of the Guinean boys. But the boat is perhaps the one such
medium that has the largest presence in refugee narratives. Nam Les story of Vietnamese
boat people, aptly called The Boat, opens and closes with scenes that reveal
analogies to Kanafanis story: the refugees tossing in a storm on a ramshackle boat
are trapped not unlike the Palestinians in the tank. Moreover, both stories end with
the image of discarded bodies without proper burial. In Les text, the traumatized
child, Truong, succumbs to the extreme conditions on the boat and is tossed into
the sea where sharks will feed on his body. We began this examination of refugee
stories with attention to the ight on foot in which refugees traversed dangerous
territory but could maintain the semblance of autonomy as they directed themselves
the best they could through the dangers they faced. On the tossing boat, Mai cannot
control the movement of her body: A body collided into hers, slammed her against
the side of the hatch door . Other bodies she was on top of them thighs and
ribs and arms and heads jammed this way and that (Le 2008: 230). Surrendering
the fate of refugees to the connes of the boat or the hull of a water tank, Le and
Kanafani narrate their stories from a bleaker perspective than Eggers or Umutesi.
Both the boat and the tank place the refugees in a realm of living death: the boat
navigates a sea that is compared to the elds of the dead, those plots of ocean
where thousands had capsized (Le 2008: 233), and the hot, dark tank is compared
to Hell (Kanafani 1978: 41). Survival of the journey is the equivalent to a passage
through death.
In addition to the original catastrophe that displaced them and which is the basis
of their legal claim to protection, refugees also have the story of their ight, which takes
shape as repeated instances of reversals of fortune on the journey. Thus perhaps what
these stories argue for is a more nuanced understanding of the narrative of catastrophe.
Catastrophe is registered as an aftereect and has a scattering eect. The narrative
of catastrophe is permeated by its shrapnel, so to speak, and unable to recreate a

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sense of wholeness (Qader 2009: 1011). The narrative arc of the stories of ight
suggests we should rethink the framing of refugee experience as the result of a single
event of expulsion/displacement in the past and see it instead as a tide of events that
we cannot stem without returning to the refugee subject a promise of a future.

Further reading

Arendt, H. (1976) Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt. (Most inuential theory of
statelessness.)
Mezlekia, N. (2002) Notes from the Hyenas Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood, New York: Picador.
(Memoir of boys ight during Ethiopias Red Terror.)
Shemak, A. (2011) Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse, New York:
Fordham University Press. (Study of New World refugee experience through literature.)

References

Agier, M. (2002) Between War and City: Towards an Urban Anthropology of Refugee
Camps, Ethnography 3(3): 31741.
Arendt, H. (1994) We Refugees, in M. Robinson (ed.), Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile,
Boston: Faber and Faber.
Dawes, J. (2007) That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Eggers, D. (2006) What Is the What, New York: Vintage.
(2007) It Was Just Boys Walking, The Guardian, May 25. Available online at www.the
guardian.com/books/2007/may/26/featuresreviews.guardianreview29 (accessed April 10, 2014).
Emecheta, B. (1983) Destination Biafra, Glasgow: Fontana.
Fassin, D. (2012) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Kanafani, G. (1978) Men in the Sun, trans. H. Kilpatrick, London: Heinemann.
Le, N. (2008) The Boat, New York: Knopf.
Levi, P. (1996) Survival in Auschwitz, trans. S. Wolf, New York: Touchstone.
Malkki, L. (2002) News from Nowhere: Mass Displacement and Globalized Problems of
Organization, Ethnography 3(3): 35160.
Peteet, J. (2005) Landscape of Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee Camps, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Qader, N. (2009) Narratives of Catastrophe: Boris Diop, ben Jelloun, Khatibi, New York:
Fordham University Press.
Umutesi, M. B. (2004) Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire, trans.
J. Emerson, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) (2011) Convention and Protocol
Relating to the Status of Refugees, UN Refugee Agency. Available online at www.unhcr.org/
pages/49da0e466.html (accessed April 10, 2014).
(2014a) Behind the Statistics, UN Refugee Agency. Available online at www.unhcr.org/
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(2014b) Flowing Across Border, UN Refugee Agency. Available online at www.unhcr.
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