Horror, hopelessness, nightmares, protracted suffering, trauma that lasts generations, separation from family and friends, serious decisions being made about your future without your input, unfair blame and ever-shifting political positions: all of these are common themes in three new books that look at different refugee situations in Asia.
What does it mean to be trapped in cycles of abuse? Where is the way out? And what does getting stuck with this label of “refugee” do to your dignity and sense of self, or alter how others feel they can treat you?
Kaamil Ahmed’s new book, I Feel No Peace, focuses on the experience of the Rohingya, a persecuted minority from Myanmar.
Guardian reporter Ahmed – who grew up speaking Bengali – first visited the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh in 2015, two years before a major offensive by Myanmar’s military forced more than 700,000 away from their homes. But his account switches between previous decades, in a manner that is effective at placing the recent exodus of Rohingya in its historical position: as something that had happened multiple times before, and will likely happen again.
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The text is filled with personal stories clearly gleaned from extensive interviews conducted throughout years spent building trust. At the beginning, Ahmed describes how the oppressed Rohingya in Myanmar practised “stillness”: they knew “they could not move, not unless they were to run”, but “it was better to be home than live as a stranger”.
Myanmar has long claimed that the Rohingya are foreigners, denying them rights. That means Rohingya are constantly trying to prove their historical links to the country, but many can’t because of the never-ending persecution. “The dirt around homes in northern Rakhine has often been turned by instruments digging a safe place to secure those documents by Rohingya preparing to run, scared they might lose them during the escape… and hoping the papers would survive the coming fires,” Ahmed writes.
He focuses in particular on the massacre in Tula Toli village, interviewing survivors about their horrifying ordeals. Children were murdered in front of their mothers before the mothers were raped. Dead babies washed up on a riverbank.
Men are sold into labour, including on trawlers. Women can be forced into marriage. Neighbouring countries even tow approaching boats back out to sea and abandon them
It was partially their misplaced trust in authorities that led to their deaths. The Rohingya were given assurances that they would be safe, Ahmed tells us, leaving them with no escape route.
For those that finally cross the river to Bangladesh, a new type of abuse begins. From 1992, Bangladesh also refused to register refugees, declaring them illegal immigrants. Taking exams meant studying in secret and using a fake Bangladeshi ID card. Talking to visiting foreign diplomats led to summons and reprimands. “If they were to stay, the Rohingya had to accept a life of restrictions and humiliations,” Ahmed writes. “They were offered only the chance to survive precariously.”
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Extrajudicial killings in the camps are so common that Ahmed assures the reader that the one he writes about, using a false name, will never be identified.
Traffickers – who refer to the Rohingya as “black chicken” – circle. And, as with many refugees all over the world, “their reprieve would only deliver them to more exploitation”.
Ahmed shows how trafficking leads to torture on land and on sea, ransoms demands and mass graves. “A whole trafficking industry had been built off the Rohingya desire for more freedom.” Between 2012 and 2015, about 170,000 Rohingya and Bangladeshis were moved by sea. Men are sold into labour, including on trawlers. Women can be forced into marriage. Neighbouring countries even tow approaching boats back out to sea and abandon them.
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Cecile Pin’s debut novel, Wandering Souls, begins with a boat journey. Sixteen-year-old Anh and her brothers Minh (14) and Thanh (10) leave Vietnam without their parents and four other siblings in 1978, on the understanding that the rest of the family will soon join them. They are among the Vietnamese “boat people” aiming for Hong Kong, from where they hope to be resettled and rejoin an uncle in the US. Instead, their parents and siblings are murdered, and Anh is thrust into a caretaker role for her younger brothers.
We follow the orphans’ lives across decades, as they are moved to the UK: first to a camp, and then into a one- bedroom council flat where they study, get jobs, and fall in love or fall apart. Margaret Thatcher is in power, but there is a flash of the debate in Ireland today when it comes to refugee treatment – a reminder that these debates are far from new.
“She said she would make home for ten thousand refugees,” one character says. “But where these homes are, it’s a mystery. They’re having to place refugees in hotels, can you believe it?”
This moving novel plays with form, and includes interstitials from someone investigating the crimes that took place against Vietnam’s refugees; American soldiers; news reports; and one dead sibling, Dao, whose voice continues from beyond the grave.
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Another book that plays with form is that of Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish-Iranian writer who became famous for his reportage from Australia’s offshore detention centre, Manus Island.
Boochani’s first book, the autobiographical novel No Friend But the Mountains, was written through WhatsApp messages sent from detention via hidden phones, and went on to win Australia’s most prestigious literary award, the Victorian Prize.
Now he is back with Freedom, Only Freedom, a collection of his own work interspersed with that of 21 other writers: academics, fellow detainees and journalists. It covers a period from 2013-2020, after Boochani made it to New Zealand, where he claimed asylum.
Australia’s deliberate goal was to break these people. I discovered that in Australia, as elsewhere, politicians try to create imaginary ‘enemies’
— Moones Mansoubi
Boochani was a victim of Australia’s efforts to “stop the boats”, which saw offshore immigration detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru reopened in 2012, in a so-called “Pacific solution”, where asylum seekers were detained for years and told they could never settle in Australia.
In detention, he loses his name: he is referred to by a list of letters and numbers – something he “got used to…eventually”. Security guards raid rooms, rip up papers and confiscate phones. In 2015, the Australian government threatened that anyone exposing the conditions could be sentenced to up to two years in prison.
Boochani calls Manus the “island of the damned”. People are so desperate they set themselves on fire. Eventually, he makes it to New Zealand as a result of his literary success.
The inclusions from others, including his Iranian-Australian translator and collaborator Moones Mansoubi, really enhance this text. “Australia’s deliberate goal was to break these people,” Mansoubi writes. “I discovered that in Australia, as elsewhere, politicians try to create imaginary ‘enemies’.”
There were dozens of refugee writers on Manus and Nauru. “Writing and reading is one way to restore the human face of the refugee condition, to document the history, to bring about transformative change, and to help reclaim an identity for those who had no choice but to exercise their legal right to seek asylum,” Mansoubi writes.
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All three books touch on the arbitrary and often changing rules that govern the lives of refugees and asylum seekers, many of which stop them from being able to do much productively. And they speak of the shame that can accompany the refugee label – when full lives are reduced to the worst things that have happened in them.
They also all look at the role of rich countries and multilateral institutions. Boochani, for obvious reasons, focuses on Australia and its offshoring “law devoid of all forms of mutual respect”, which “employs language used to manipulate and control not only ourselves…but also the Australian public”.
In all three books, making it to a wealthy country is seen as key to achieving any real form of security
Ahmed conveys how critical Rohingya refugees are of the United Nations. The UN “played a political game” by failing to listen to them directly or speak out in support of their interests, even at one point failing to raise objections to food being used as a political weapon against them; the situation may have resulted in thousands of deaths. In one UN meeting, Ahmed quotes a senior official: “The Rohingyas are primitive people. At the end of the day, they will go where they are told to go.”
The books see making it to a wealthy country as key to achieving any real form of security. It offers the chance not only to establish a future, but also to speak out freely about the past and the present for those left behind. Even then, life is a struggle. “There was no peace for the Rohingya, wherever they went,” Ahmed writes in his introduction.
In Wandering Souls, meanwhile, Anh experiences a “hardening” heart at parting with a kind social worker, whose presence reminds her that her family are “foreigners that had to be surveyed and chaperoned at all times”.
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Anyone reading these books will find it impossible to connect what is happening in them to the situation we are seeing today regarding the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers across the western world. All three are antidotes for those who had any doubt of the inequality, desperation and injustice that characterises how the world treats refugees: silencing their voices and thereby making it easier to degrade them, and even ignore mounting death tolls. They show clearly the mental toll that results from not being wanted, and the deliberate stripping of opportunities and a future from people who are humans, the same as the rest of us.
Even Pin’s book, though fiction, makes a point of referencing recent realities, with a flash forward to 2019, and the real-life discovery of 39 bodies in Essex. They were Vietnamese people, suffocated in the back of a truck. Some had tried to pierce open the roof with a metal pole before they perished, she notes.
“By the time they’d reached the promised land – England – the passengers were already dead.”
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RELATED BOOKS
No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs by Nury Turkel (William Collins, 2022) describes China’s treatment of its Uighur population. This book won the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing in January. It was published last year and was described in an Irish Times review as “a grim yet vital read”. Lawyer Turkel himself was born in a detention centre in Kashgar during the Cultural Revolution, when both his parents were incarcerated, and later escaped to the US.
First, They Erased Our Name: A Rohingya Speaks by Habiburahman, with Sophie Ansel (Scribe, 2019). A Rohingya man writes about what he endured in Myanmar until his escape in 2000.
I Am a Rohingya: Poetry from the Camps and Beyond, edited by James Byrne and Shehzar Doja (Arc Publications, 2019)
A collection of poetry by Rohingya poets.
Viet Thanh Nguyen has written various books on Vietnamese refugees, including novels The Committed and Pulitzer-Prize winning The Sympathiser, and a short story collection, The Refugees.
Sally Hayden is author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned, Irish Book of the Year and winner of the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing
