A shark for all seasons, chased by the forces of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to the United Nations, refugees are coming through Europe at a rate not seen since World War II. It rarely seems true, as Don DeLillo wrote in his 2016 novel “Zero’s”, that “half the world is redoing its kitchen; the other half is starving.” The hungry half, as often as not, is running.
Edward Said called the 20th century “Age of Refugees, Displaced Persons, Mass Immigration.” The crisis in Ukraine reminds us that the 21st century has been no different. Checkpoints, bomb shelters, open toilets, babies born in subways, insomnia, exhaustion, exposure, delays and sudden death: the news is both shocking and deeply familiar, and is a reminder of how many times mass exodus has happened in history. As Clive James himself admitted, “What was not needed would have had the same story.”
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From the very beginning, the writers have tried to capture the experience of the outsider, the exile, the thirsty traveller, the wanderer, the migrant. Ovid wrote the letters in his “Tristia” (“Sorrow”) after being exiled from Rome. In “Crime and Punishment,” a desperate man asks, “Do you understand what it means when you have absolutely no turn to turn?” I’m not here to suggest that reading makes us better, more ethical. liked the Nazis Dostoyevsky, too, But Joyce Carol Oates was certainly right when she wrote, “Reading is the only means by which we unconsciously, often helplessly, slip into another’s skin, into another’s voice, into another’s soul.”
Incredibly grim news is a reminder of how much literature Inspired by the migration crisis and its consequencesAnd how the writers try to capture the texture of a complicated life.
One reason why the stories in Anthony Vesna So’s posthumously published collection, “Afterparties” (2021), is because they underscore how exile and trauma permanently divide generations. So wrote about Cambodian American families in California’s Central Valley. Immigrant parents and Native children were looking at each other through bulletproof glass. A young woman says: “Forty years ago our parents escaped from Pol Pot, and now, what are we even doing holy (devoid)? Passion for wedding favors? wasting hundreds of dollars get our hair done,
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel “The Committed” (2021), a sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Sympathizer” (2015), features a harrowing boat trip as the narrator flees Vietnam for France. He thinks to himself: If I’m a boatman, there were also English pilgrims who came to America on the Mayflower. The pilgrims were lucky in their public relations, he continues. There were no video cameras to capture them, thin, blind and prone to lice, stumbling across the surf. Instead, Romantic painters glorified that expatriate in oil.
The grain of life of the uprooted people who were forced to flee for their lives is particularly well captured for the name but three authors, Haitian American Edwij Denticat, Ethiopian American Dinaw Mengestu and British author and the poet Warsan Shire, who was born in Kenya to Somali parents.
I was familiar with Denticat and Mengestu’s novels. I discovered the poet’s work in Dohra Ahmed’s excellent compilation, “The Penguin Book of Migration Literature” (2019). Shire is the real thing – fresh, biting, undeniably alive.
In “Children of the Sea”, Denticut’s collection “Crick? Crack!” (1995), Haitians flee political violence in a small, leaking boat. She captures not only heat but also humiliation. “Do you want to know how people go to the bathroom on the boat?” asks his narrator. not you
In Mengestu’s story “An Honest Exit”, an Ethiopian man dreaming of escaping to Europe is caught in a port city in the middle, where he sleeps and beaten up by the police. Mengestu in particular underscores his appetite. If a good meal and a drink were offered at this place, even after certain death, “the line of men awaiting death would stretch for miles.”
After landing in a grim exile center, the poet writes“I spent day and night in the belly of the truck, I didn’t get out.” She writes: “I am unwanted and my beauty is not beauty here.”
It’s easy to blur the line between refugee and immigration literature, and I’ve already done that. But each of these writers strike a chord with Zadie Smithwho wrote in “White Teeth”, “It makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of a nationalist, afraid of infection, penetration, abortion, when it is small fry, peanuts, compared to an immigrant – dismemberment, disappearing.” Happen. “
That the current crisis is brewing throughout Eastern Europe brings to mind the exodus of World War II and the literature of those migrations. It has been pointed out more than once that Western countries are probably more sympathetic to Ukrainian refugees because they are more similar to their own citizens.
If so, it is also true that this crisis has reminded the West, and almost everyone, how much we crave courage and honour. A long chain of norms has collapsed; The moral plane seems to have fallen out of the world.
It somehow matters that the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is a former comedian. Czech writer Milan Kundera has always emphasized, in his novels and elsewhere, the importance of satirical, irreverent humor as a saving human and even political feature. When someone lacks it, like Putin and Donald Trump, then you worry.
“I learned the value of humor in times of Stalinist terror,” Kundera once said. “I was 20 then. I could always recognize a man who wasn’t a Stalinist, a man I didn’t need to be afraid of, the way he smiled. A sense of humor was a reliable sign of recognition. Since then, I’ve been in awe of a world that’s losing its sense of humour.”
Something similar is said by Christopher Hitchens in his memoir “Hitch-22”. Fatwa against your friend Salman Rushdie sets his own valuesand they are what any liberal society should award: “In the Hate column: Dictatorship, Religion, Stupidity, Democracy, Censorship, Bullying and Threats. In the Love Column: Literature, Irony, Humor, Defense of the Individual and Free Expression In addition, of course, friendship. ”
Seeing the bravery of the Ukrainian people makes us wonder how we will endure in similar situations. We would all like to be George Plimpton to help Sirhan deal with.
How will we bear? An answer pops up everywhere in Quentin Tarantino’s novel “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” While watching the former US president and some news channels play with Putin, I found myself recalling this excerpt from Tarantino’s novel:
“Cliff never thought about what Americans would do if Russians, or Nazis, or Japanese, or Mexicans, or Vikings, or Alexander the Great ever occupied America by force. He knew what Americans would do. They’re up their pants Will take off and call the police. And after a brief period of despair, they line up when they learn that the police can’t only help them but are acting on behalf of the occupiers.
Putin’s nuclear weapons are on trigger alert. If your politics runs on the Let’s-Demolish-Government variety, this is probably the moment you crave, to be born again, a moment of double excitement.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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