Welcome to my first review! Make yourself at home and pull up a free tab because this first book is a Pandora's box of next reads and authors to follow. As concisely noted in the subtitle, The Displaced is a collection of essays by refugee writers on refugee lives. What that title can’t convey, and what readers will hopefully come to understand well before the end of this captivating work, is that there is so much encapsulated in that brief description. Though already two years old, read it and you'll understand why Viet Thanh Nguyen's singular collection came to be the obvious choice for The Home Room's inaugural review. The Displaced swept me away with wave after wave of compelling narrative and introduced me to new authors whose work I can't wait to explore and consider. One of my main goals for this blog is to introduce readers to a wide range of refugee authors and stories, and with The Displaced I've found this mission mirrored in one masterful collection.
Nguyen has earned notoriety and a jaw-droppingly impressive list of accolades during his writing career exploring topics like identity, inclusion, equity and justice in a refugee context. His novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a feat that was quickly followed by a 2017 MacArthur fellowship for Nguyen. With The Displaced, Nguyen has leveraged this status to showcase other refugee authors whose experience and literary talent inform and enrich the public narrative on refugee lives.
As individual parts, each of these essays stands alone as a well-crafted reflection from a refugee author on, essentially, the ways they were treated as less than human, or made to feel unwelcome, as a result of the enormous challenges that accompany the double-edged label of refugee. They allow us to share the confusion, hope, sorrow, pride, pain and fear of exile and of the pernicious ordeal of adapting among people who vocally or passively resent your existence in their country. As a collection, it is an exclamation of humanity. In Nguyen's words, “When we do see the other, the other is not truly human to us, by very definition of being an other, but is instead a stereotype, a joke, or a horror.”
Nguyen’s introduction, which is itself a characteristically stirring essay, sets the tone for the collection to follow with powerful honesty about the place a refugee occupies in a world not built for them and not well adjusted to their existence. “I was born a citizen and a human being.” (!!!) End the book right here, what else even needs to be said?! To me, that sentence alone, with all its unsaid implications, captures the base injustices at the heart of it all.
But, to continue… "At four years of age I became something less than human, at least in the eyes of those who do not think of refugees as being human.” Are you one of those people? Am I? The answer may not be as obvious as our knee-jerk responses, no matter what our background.
The ensuing essays employ wit and humor, and sometimes downright anger to tackle themes like assuming a new national identity in Canada, a country competing with giants to find its own identity, or disillusionment and confusion towards a supposedly welcoming host country’s shifting views in a time of mounting nationalism. Dina Nayeri’s essay is an unapologetic rejection of Western insistence on an all-encompassing gratitude from the refugees (or any foreigner) living among them in exchange for tolerance. Maaza Mengiste (who has now been long-listed for the Booker Prize for The Shadow King!) offers a beautiful mediation on the invisible chaos and ironic reinvention inherent to a refugee’s second chance at life in a foreign land.
It’s also worth noting that collectively, The Displaced recognizes the definition of a refugee in the way that most people not familiar with its legal definition probably assume it; that is, in the inclusive way it ought to be used. Certain aspects make the ideology of the book more closely aligned with that of more progressive, extra-UN refugee advocates like The Critical Refugee Studies Collective (of which, Nguyen's partner is a founding member), whose definition, contrary to international law, recognizes “human beings forcibly displaced within or outside of their land of origin as a result of persecution, conflict, war, conquest, settler/colonialism, militarism, occupation, empire, and environmental and climate-related disasters, regardless of their legal status. Refugees can be self-identified and are often unrecognized within the limited definitions proffered by international and state laws, hence may be subsumed, in those instances, under other labels such as “undocumented”. Emphases my own.
This book aims to move people to make change. As Nguyen writes in his introduction, “Literature changes the world of readers and writers, but literature does not change the world until people get out of their chairs, go out in the world, and do something to transform the conditions of which the literature speaks.” So I implore you to find a quiet place to absorb all that this compelling collection has in store for you, then let yourself be moved. Literally.
If you want to read more from The Displaced's contributing writers, here are some links to their author sites or social media/other pages, depending on what I could find.
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