Day 286: The Displaced

Photo by Julie Ricard on Unsplash

Kao Kalia Yang recalled the feat of daring that the children in the refugee camp in Thailand pulled off when she was five.

Lev Golinkin remembered his father, always a careful rule-follower at home in the Ukraine, sneaking him into the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna.

Dina Nayeri reflected on “gratitude,” both genuine and obligatory.

These stories and seventeen others paint a textured portrait of the refugee experience in The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

For our “book club” today, students in the Immigration Law Clinic chose to read and discuss this book.

Students highlighted the poignant details that made these stories come to life, the sometimes surprising ways in which refugees consciously “covered,” and the power dynamics involved in our attorney-client relationships.

The powerful sense of holding “refugee” as an identity struck all of us. One student wondered if the book reflected some selection bias — we could think of client and friends who consciously do not identify in that way, although their stories resemble those in the book.

Ultimately, our conversation evolved to existential questions about individuation and identity. For the person coping with trauma, most people agreed, telling stories can be cathartic, perhaps essential, and we value those stories for the empathy they teach us.

For humanity, however, we worried that our intense identifications (and we discussed our own) seem to be the wedge that our enemies are using to drive us apart. And divisions only create more refugees. Are we doomed to repeat the cycle endlessly?