Here is Jozef, who arrived in Chicago before the siege of Sarajevo and must now watch his home turn to ruins, without even the designation of refugee as shelter. In his novel Nowhere Man, Aleksandar Hemon dares to give the unpalatable immigrant boy a place. One of the most infuriating distinctions made in today’s refugee debate is between refugees and economic migrants, who are often young men depicted as opportunists. Photograph: Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images I was blown away by how much this man saw – things that have taken me 30 years of reflection to be willing to talk about.īehrouz Boochani wrote his memoir of incarceration on Manus Island on a mobile phone. It is an intimate, heartbreaking account of daily life in transit, in this particular social and political context, and of the many ways these families are rejected and exploited along the way. Maarouf’s power comes from knowing that humans will persist in their absurdity even to the point of death.įor a rigorous journalistic understanding of today’s primary migrant route into Europe (through the western Balkans), I recommend BBC correspondent Nick Thorpe’s The Road Before Me Weeps. These tales show the strangeness of the world through young eyes, and given their indistinct sense of place, they evoke many childhoods and many funny families (including mine). Mazen Maarouf’s Jokes for the Gunmen is a hilarious and bizarre portrait of childhood in wartime. Among ourselves, exiles know the best way to tell stories is with comedy. Every refugee has escaped from something, often unthinkable.
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