LITERATURE WITH A WHITE HELMET: THE TEXTUAL-CORPOREALITY OF BEING, BECOMING, AND REPRESENTING REFUGEES Lava Asaad Middle Tennessee State University May 2019 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Dissertation Committee: Dr. Allen Hibbard Dr. Laura White Dr. Marion Hollings ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank everyone and no one ii ABSTRACT This dissertation asserts that the refugee crisis and its literature should not be examined as if it is a one-dimensional phenomenon. Not all refugees’ experiences circle around getting on a boat only to become a problem for a reluctant host county, although that certainly does happen. With the large number of texts produced and their common themes and styles, “refugee literature” can actually be thought of as its own unique genre. This study explores issues of refugee writers, contemporary works of fiction and nonfiction on the refugee’s body and experience, the biopolitics of refugees, and disputes over the ethicality of representing refugees by writers and human rights activists. The dissertation relies on a broad selection of texts by authors who, in one way or another, have experienced displacement, witnessed it, imagined it, or co-written about it. Although attention has been given to refugee writers and their story more recently, this study argues, specifically, that the refugee crisis is not a recent one and internal displacement is a refugee experience in itself, granted that we broaden the media- presented idea of refugees. First, the dissertation cautiously approaches labels frequently used in academic discourse (like migrant, immigrant, refugee, persecution, human rights, and nation-state) relying on their political meanings. The refugee crisis is a political crisis par excellence. Second, the dissertation applies a new understanding to the refugee crisis through examining works by writers who are not commonly associated with being refugees. It is important to note that I am not romanticizing the label nor am I approaching it metaphorically. I am merely expanding the label to include voices and experiences that would not usually be considered as refugee literature. Finally, the work also includes iii “typical” refugee narratives in order to reach a new understanding of these texts beyond the common plot tropes of persecution and escape. The dissertation adds a thread, usually missing from critical lenses on migration, that assesses Human Rights Literature in ways that problematize issues of agency and speaking on behalf of the refugees. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ………………………… ……………………………….….…1 CHAPTER ONE: DOES THE THEORY HOLD? RE-EXAMINING MOBILITY STUDIES AND THE STATUS OF THE POSTMODERN REFUGEE…………………………………………………………………….…... 16 CHAPTER TWO: NOMADIC WRITERS: THE REFUGEE AS A WRITER, TEXTS AS REFUGEES (SAMAR YAZBEK, SA’DALLAH WANNOUS, NIHAD SIREES, KHALID KHALIFA, AND MUSTAFA KHALIFA)……………………………………………………………………….…54 CHPATER THREE: CLANDESTINE BODIES IN TRANSIT: REFUGEES’ PIPE DREAMS ………………………………………………….….91 CHAPTER FOUR: MUTED BODIES, OBSTRUCTED ROUTES: GHASSAN KANAFANI, HASSAN BLASIM, PIERTO BARTOLO………….…122 CHAPTER FIVE: CAN THE REFUGEE SPEAK? VOICE BY PROXY, STORYTELLING AND SURROGATE AGENCIES……...154 CONCLUSION: EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE …………………………….180 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………….185 v 1 INTRODUCTION “What’s my sin that has brought me far from my country?” Kurdish Song Identities as fragments, strewn across borders, within and outside national narratives, belonging to the future with complicated ties to the past, were and continue to be part of narratives I grew up with. As part of the Kurdish diaspora (I was born in 1989), whose ethnic validity has been questioned within multiple rigid national-states, such as Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, mobility was and is ever present in stories woven about the past and the present. Being part of an imagined community that has no tangible geographical borders romanticized both the literal and the metaphorical notions of being a nomad, of constant flight away from identity erasures in the name of the homogenized nation-state. Syrian Kurd: the two halves of my identity— where the latter was forever displaced and imagined, the former was rooted, fixed, and had a place on the map. With the recent shaking-up of the mighty nation-state, Syrian bodies, alive or dead or missing, are also scattered across the globe, marking a new layer of displacement about me, of me, and perhaps in me. My study, primarily focusing on fictionalized expressions (often autobiographically informed) of the refugee experience, has recourse to my personal experience and the lived experiences both of those who are legally defined as refugees and those who continue to roam, as immigrants. The recent refugee crisis (specifically in Europe as the crisis has been considered one of the largest movement of people from the Middle East and Africa into the continent) has left thousands of bodies lingering on 2 foreign borders waiting to be acknowledged and admitted. International humanitarian interest in the subject has filled the media with images of displaced Syrian refugees alongside camps, gazing hopelessly into what is behind the fenced area, or dead on some Mediterranean shore. These experiences are a constant reminder of previous incidents of human displacement. Contemporary media has aptly made the connection between the current refugee crisis and the European refugee crisis during and following World War II. Aside from the political and economic dilemma that refugees experience, their subhuman treatment has rendered them a hot topic in the media, producing a “legitimate” fear of their otherness, a common denominator between different refugee experiences across history. One of many scathing example of dehumanizing refugees as viruses and vermin is Katie Hopkins, a media personality and a columnist for British national newspapers, called refugees as “cockroaches” and who can survive even a nuclear bomb and suggesting to “burn all the boats in North Africa” (Williams). The dehumanizing image of refugees as less than human and indistinguishable mass impels us to turn to literary depiction as a way to counteract the dominant negative rhetoric. Occurring usually as a set of images bewailing their state of displacement, a new understanding of the refugee experience, of their silenced journey, should come to the front. The plight of refugees is typically seen either as a collective experience and mass of people who are treated as sub- humans, or individually where the refugee is all too often associated with malice and threat to national security. One main privilege that refugees often lose the minute they cross borders is the right to have a voice, which entails the loss of being heard and acknowledged as human beings. In this dissertation, I explore issues of mobile bodies who have experienced different levels of displacement. The intensity and the heterogeneity of the refugee 3 experience cannot be wholly incorporated into one work like this one, but this dissertation can shed some light on certain commonalities. I draw from postcolonial theories on diaspora to see how the terms apply to being a postmodern refugee, which like postmodernism itself, means people cannot be fully articulated and defined. Instead of sharing one stereotypical experience, the postmodern refugees throughout this dissertation have different characteristics, lifestyles, and different goals, and most certainly, different results. The “mobility turn” in academic approaches to literatures has been a transdisciplinary catchphrase augmented by the recent surge of refugees’ movement and disruption of spatial identities. Postcolonial theories, as a result, would naturally benefit from this increased interest in the Other manifested as refugees who trigger feelings of both sympathy and apprehension. The mobility turn acknowledges the circulation of people globally and in a transnational manner. Refugees are also often clumped with this process of migration. I argue how the mobility of refugees can result in immobility as well, as in the case of setting them in camps for indefinite period of times. Postcolonial terms such as hybridity and assimilation are classical in their treatment of the mobile Other; however, there may be limits to the utility of these concepts since being a refugee entails an initial state of displacement and involves a preliminary encounter with the host country. The metaphor used in the dissertation’s title, Literature with A White Helmet, is a bowing gesture to the White Helmets’ volunteers who operate in conflict areas in Syria. Those are the people who have taken the responsibility upon themselves to voluntarily rescue and aid civilians. This self-less act is the driving force which parallels some writers and activists who also fuel their texts with a loud cry to help preserve the humanity of the Other. Although the current Syrian crisis is the major backbone of this 4 work, there have not yet been sufficient literary texts produced that deal with the humanitarian crisis of the displaced Syrians. The volatility of conditions inside Syria, the contemporaneity of the crisis, and the fluctuating reactions from the international community have resulted in a scarcity of first-hand accounts coming from inside and outside of the war-torn country. Therefore, the selection of texts that I include gives us just a glimpse of what it means to be a refugee/displaced writer, and what it means to