The Politics of Migration and its Reflections in Literature

Dr. Ancy Eapen Research Supervisor Department of English Jain deemed-to-be University Attria Campus, Palace Road Bangalore Karnataka Ph: 7025234403 Email ID: [email protected] The Politics of Migration and its Reflections in Literature The term ‘diaspora’ was first used for the dispersal of Jews from their homeland through the Assyrian exile in 733 BCE and again with the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah by Sargon II. The Babylonian captivity of the Jews from Judah in 597 BCE, followed by the Neo- Babylonian Empire, under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar II, in 586 BCE further scattered the Jewish population. Though the Babylonian exile ended and some of the population returned to their native land, by the middle of the first century CE, the Judean population revolted against the Roman Empire in 66 CE, in the First Jewish- Roman War, resulting in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. During the siege, the Romans destroyed the Second temple and most of Jerusalem. This had a major impact on the Semitic race. The Temple at Jerusalem was the center of their religion and identity. After the destruction of the Second Temple, many of them decided to formulate a new self-definition. The prospect of an indefinite period of displacement from their homeland resulted in the Jewish diaspora. The term has a Greek etymology meaning ‘dispersal’ and this was used to describe the new status of the Jews, who left their land, to settle in other countries. In contemporary parlance the term ‘diaspora’ is used to describe people who migrate from their country of origin to other countries to settle there. The reasons for such a migration can be many and varied. Voluntary migration refers to those who migrate to developed countries in search of higher education, better job and financial prospects. Involuntary migrants include those Asians and Africans, who were transported to countries in the West for indentured labour and as slaves. In the twentieth century we see another category called ‘forced migration.’ Patricia Hynes in her book Introducing Forced Migration (2021) uses the term to refer to citizens who have been forced to flee their native countries due to natural disasters, persecutions, war, poverty or such extreme situations. These are the refugees or Internally Displaced People as they are officially termed, who leave their land in order to escape extreme situations in order to survive. They have lost their home, property, and sometimes dear ones, in the course of a perilous journey, the outcome of which they themselves do not know. Many perish en route, and those who live have to begin anew. In almost all cases there is a political context that has displaced them; there is further politics in their entry or resettlement in a country of choice. The sad narratives of such migrants, must be written and read as part of Diaspora Studies. A selection of texts that include fiction, non-fiction, and memoir, provides insight into the subject: ‘Politics of Migration and its Reflections in Literature’. Spanning the period from the Holocaust of World War II to the most recent Afghanistan and Syrian Wars, the novels The Silver Sword (1956), The Lightless Sky (2019), The Syrian’s Story (2014), Refugee (2017) are fictions which are based on true stories of men. Literature has always reflected the period and the times, in which it has been written. Just as Victorian novels of Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens , Jane Austen among others depict the social reality of pre-industrial English society poised on a transition from an agrarian economy to an Industrial one, similarly, such stories about forced migrants and asylum seekers describe the twenty first era’s crisis: people forced to flee their country due to natural disasters or human political interferences. The fictional works are supported by facts from non-fiction works such as Ben Rawlence, The City of Thorns (2016), Patrick Kingsley’s The New Odyssey (2016), Samar Yazbek’s The Crossing (2012), Reece Jones’ Violent Borders (2016), Jeremy Harding’s Border Vigils,(2012) and Patricia Hynes’ Introducing Forced Migrations (2021). In this era of globalization, we witness an extraordinary scale of human migration. There are some 200 million people alive today who have moved from their native country. This is the modern diaspora. The political reactions of the developed countries have not been encouraging to migrants. Each of these countries U.K, U.S, France, India, Israel have resorted to immigration-restricting policies, made walls, barbed-electric fences to keep away migrants. So they die in trucks, or drown en route in seas or oceans; they are murdered in smuggling operations, their women raped and exploited and the children separated from their families at a very tender age. More than 15,000 people have died in the last twenty years trying to circumvent European entry restrictions. Jeremy Harding’s documentary non-fiction Border Vigils (2012), describe the realities of economic migrants and refugees or asylum seekers, in the world. There is no mention of ‘economic migrants’ in the terms for refugees that was laid down in the Geneva Convention of 1951 and the following Protocols in 1967. The global politics that operate to deny poor and homeless migrants’ entry into developed States in the world is also asymmetrical, dependent on the requirement of the host country and not the need of the migrant. The recent decision of the European Union to deny the entry of Syrian refugees in the War of 2012-2015 is a case in point. Finally only Germany agreed to take maximum refugees followed by Poland and Romania. Britain even architected Brexit to be exempted from such a humanitarian endeavour. Harding in his book points out, that the European Union has a land border of "nearly 9,000km" and a coastline of "another 42,000km" which can be breached by ingenious people-smugglers and determined would-be migrants. In one of the reports he made he describes one regular breacher of the Mexican-American desert border who endured a three-day, crossing: "He was flayed below the knees by cacti and when his shoes came to pieces … he walked the last day barefoot over red rock, a coarse oxidised sandstone … The soles of each foot [became] a single blister from ball to heel, like a gel pack. [From America] he was deported again... [He made] his next attempt shortly afterwards …" (Harding, 2012, p.60) The politics of antisemitism that has existed in the world, for centuries, beginning from the Roman Empire, and continuing into the Middle Ages, reinforced by Hitler’s Nazism, has been the subject of many novels. During 1939-1945 of World War II, Jews came to be hunted down in Germany and German-occupied territories and put into concentration camps. It is estimated that six million Jews were exterminated in this way. It was one-third of the Jewish diaspora. Ian Serrailler’s classic novel for children, The Silver Sword (1956) is based in the context of World War II and the Holocaust. The story is set in the suburbs of Warsaw, Poland that was under German occupation at that time. It is about Joseph Balicki, a school headmaster, his wife Margrit, and their three children: Ruth thirteen, her brother Edek eleven, and their little sister Bronia. One day, Nazis came and arrested their father Joseph Balicki, for standing up against the tyranny of Hitler. His ‘crime’ was that he turned the photo of Hitler hanging on the wall inwards, facing the wall. Joseph is put into prison, their mother caught and taken to the labor camp and their house bombed. Political conflicts, such as war, affects children in ways, quite different than the adults. The children of the Balicki family, know that they might never see their parents again. Ruth, Edek Bronia in The Silver Sword, (Seraillier 1956), Joef and Mahmoud in Refugee,(Gratz 2017), and Gulwali in Lightless Sky (Passerlay 2019), are children in the age of twelve and thirteen, who take up the responsibility of saving themselves, their siblings, and sometimes their ailing parents who have become ‘shells’ due to the tortures they have gone through. One day, Josef a twelve-year old Jew is humiliated by a German non-Jew teacher. He is called to the front of the classroom and ridiculed for his facial features, such as shape of nose, chin, eyes, as being the means of identifying a Jew from a German. Josef feels humiliated “like he was an animal. A specimen: Something sub-human” ( Gratz, 2017,p. 20). Ruth, Edek and Bronia find themselves homeless, without food or shelter after their parents are taken away by Nazi soldiers. They stay underground in the cellar after the bombing. Ruth runs a school there for other displaced children. Edek who is only eleven years old, takes the responsibility of getting them food by smuggling, or doing odd jobs. But one day he is caught by the Nazis and put into prison for two years. Ruth is left alone with her three-year old sister. Jan is another boy who has no one and lives on the streets. But he has met their father, who has entrusted him with the silver sword which is actually a letter opener that had been gifted to their mother. Ruth gives shelter to Jan, and finds the ‘secret’ gift as well as the encouraging news of their father being alive and on his way to Switzerland with their mother. Along with Jan, they find Edek who has finished his prison term, and finally they are able to take a train to Switzerland. The family gets united. Alan Gratz’s story of a Jewish family in his novel Refugee (2017) is a heartrending account of the destiny of Jews in Hitler’s Germany. Josef, the son of a well-known Jewish lawyer, lived in Germany, in 1939. Josef, is twelve years old and his younger sister Ruthie just six years old, when they are ordered to leave Germany. At first Josef’s father, ignores the warning, but soon he is imprisoned by Nazis. He is released only on the day they sail for Cuba on a ship St. Louis that was carrying nine hundred and eight Jews from Germany to Cuba. It was 1939, and the World War had started. Cuba had agreed to give them asylum. The atrocities and horrors of the concentration camp has reduced Josef’s father to a mental wreck. He refuses to leave the cabin, fearing that he would be caught again by the Nazis. The Captain of the ship treats the Jewish passengers extremely well and all are happy, until they reach the port in Havana, after seventeen days of sailing. A boat carrying 937 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution is turned away from Havana, Cuba, on May 27, 1939. Only 28 immigrants are admitted into the country. After appeals to the United States and Canada for entry are denied, the rest are forced to sail back to Europe, where they’re distributed among several countries including Great Britain and France. A Ship of Jewish Refugees Was Refused US Landing in 1939. This Was Their Fate On May 13, the S.S. St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany to Havana, Cuba. Most of the passengers—many of them children—were German Jews escaping increasing persecution under the Third Reich. Six months earlier, 91 people were killed and Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues were destroyed in what became known as the Kristallnacht pogrom. It was becoming increasing clear the Nazis were accelerating their efforts to exterminate Jews by arresting them and placing them in concentration camps. World War II and the formal implementation of The Final Solution were just months from beginning.  The refugees had applied for U.S. visas, and planned to stay in Cuba until they could enter the United States legally. Even before they set sail, their impending arrival was greeted with hostility in Cuba. On May 8, there was a massive anti-Semitic demonstration in Havana. Right-wing newspapers claimed that the incoming immigrants were Communists. The St. Louis arrived in Havana on May 27. Roughly 28 people onboard had valid visas or travel documents and were allowed to disembark. The Cuban government refused to admit the nearly 900 others. For seven days, the ship’s captain attempted to negotiate with Cuban officials, but they refused to comply. The ship sailed closer to Florida, hoping to disembark there, but it was not permitted to dock. Some passengers attempted to cable President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for refuge, but he never responded. A State Department telegram stated that the asylum-seekers must “await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States.” As a last resort, the St. Louis continued north to Canada, but it was rejected there, too. “No country could open its doors wide enough to take in the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who want to leave Europe: the line must be drawn somewhere,” Frederick Blair, Canada’s director of immigration, said at the time. Faced with no other options, the ship returned to Europe. It docked in Antwerp, Belgium on June 17. By then, several Jewish organizations had secured entry visas for the refugees in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Great Britain. The majority who had traveled on the ship survived the Holocaust; 254 later died as the Nazis swept through the continent.  1939May 27 Citation Information Article Title Ship carrying 937 Jewish refugees, fleeing Nazi Germany, is turned away in Cuba Author History.com Editors Website Name HISTORY URL https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ss-st-louis-jewish-refugees-turned-away-holocaust Access Date March 13, 2022 Publisher A&E Television Networks Last Updated May 26, 2020 Original Published Date May 21, 2019 BY  HISTORY.COM EDITORS from your inbox. The ship waits in the harbour for two days, and then the captain is told to take the ship and its passengers, back to Europe. During this time, Josef’s father attempts suicide and he is hospitalized in Havana. With great pain and apprehension, the family is forced to leave him behind in Cuba as the ship sets sail for Europe again. The Jews are frightened about their future and the captain assures them that he would take them to England, not Germany.Josef , his mother and sister reach France. They are caught By Nazis who allows one child to be set free for all the money and jewellery which Josef’s mother gives them. Josef gives his sister, while he and his mother are sent to the concentration camps. We come to know later that both of them died there. Ruthie is brought up by a kind Frenchwoman, and later she settles down in Germany after the war ends. The memoir of Gulwali Passerlay titled Lightless Sky (2019) depicts the crisis in Afghanistan in 2012 when Taliban forces captured Kabul and were advancing to the other cities. Eleven -year -old Gulwali and his brother, thirteen years old, are forced by their mother to escape Pastun, their village, after their father and grandfather has been killed by U.S. army, for suspected support given to the Taliban. Their mother is afraid that the Taliban will come and take away her sons to train them as terrorists. This was happening to many young boys. Gulwali and his brother are given a backpack and sent away. They reach Peshawar in Pakistan but circumstances separate the brothers. Gulwali is smuggled into Iran, and he begins a journey across Europe, that would last for twelve months. He is imprisoned, suffer hunger and terrors, rowing across the Mediterranean Sea. But the determination to reach safety keeps him going forward. He has to spend desolate months in the camp at Calais. He survives and reaches Britain. There he is adopted by a family, educated, and goes on to the university. He is twenty-three years old when he is chosen to carry the torch in the Olympics 2012. Gulwali wrote his memoir to bring to the world the plight of thousands of men, women and children who make the perilous journey every day. Mahmoud , a twelve year old boy is one of the characters in the novel Refugee (Gratz, 2017). We see the tragedy that shapes Syrian citizens in the story of Mahmoud and his family. They lived in Aleppo. One day after returning from school with his brother Waleed, he is shocked to see the neighbouring buildings bombed. Next day his own apartment is destroyed. He extricated himself from under the rubble with great difficulty. The same day the family decided to flee the land. “It’s not safe here. It hasn’t been for months. Years. We should have gone long ago. Ready or not, if we want to live, we have to leave Syria”(p.54) Mahmoud’s father tells his family. They are joined by thousands of Syrians on a similar journey to Turkey. It takes them eight hours to reach the borders. They are able to procure temporary visas after payment. From Turkey, Mahmoud’s father hopes to go to Greece and apply for asylum there. He pays a smuggler who promises to get seats for them on a boat to Greece. There were thirty refugees. The smugglers push the dinghy into the sea, and leave them. They are left to navigate alone on the tumultuous Mediterranean Sea towards Greece. Soon the rains start and the dinghy collects water. Not much later, the dinghy capsizes and all of them are thrown into the dark sea. They had life jackets, which they discover were fake ones. They had been cheated by the vendor in Turkey. Mahmoud and his family along with some refugees are rescued from the Mediterranean Sea that dark night by Greek Coast Guards who were on a rescue mission. They were taken to the island of Lesbos in Greece. But his little sister Hana, had to be given away to strangers in order to prevent her from drowning. She had been handed over to a passing boat carrying refugees. Mahmoud’s mother was never able to get over this loss. And Mahmoud carried the guilt of having given her away even after they had reached Germany. The Syrian’s Story (2014) written by Zehara Schara begins with the words of the protagonist , Amir : “The refugee camps were hell on earth…Violence brought reporters, diseases brought doctors”(p1). Amir is a young man with a small happy family living in Homs, Syria. The Civil War between the Regime and the rebels have been going on for two years. Both sides fire across civilian areas destroying homes, offices, mosques, and schools, at the same time killing and injuring thousands. As Mohammad tells Fatima: “Rebels fired rockets from here into the heart of Damascus. It landed in a school killing 10 children. There is no good guy in this”(Schara, 2014,p.48). The Civil War created a paranoia among ordinary citizens. Neighbors turned foes and rebels, ready to kill the other, depending on who’s side one was. Amir was forced to flee, with his family when he is hunted by Assad’s army, for inadvertently repairing a car that was used by the rebels to kill the defense minister. “Lives had been shattered like mortars hitting buildings”(p.2). He reached the refugee camp with his wife Fatima, and three- year- old child, Layan. The camp that was accommodating over 1.5 million refugees, had no sanitation. The unhygienic conditions, poverty and squalor made it a ‘hell’ as Amir wrote in his novel. The stench of the camps spread miles away. Epidemics like typhoid, cholera and measles infected the refugees and many died due to lack of medical facility. Amir was one among them. Zahara captures the bewilderment of the ordinary Syrians suddenly caught in a crisis due to political strife. Their land had always been a peaceful one until the Arab Spring Uprising that spread across most of the Arab world in 2010. It is explained by Mohammad, Amir’s grandfather: “.. now all sorts of crazy people are declaring themselves in charge, for this reason or that. Arms are coming in from other countries for the army and the rebels. Religious fanatics are declaring they want an Islamic State…”(Schara,2014,p.47). Patrick Kingsley a former migration correspondent of The Guardian in his book The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis (2015) gives a first-hand account of the diverse journeys of Syrian refugee reaching Europe, from information collected during a one year’s travel journey in seventeen different countries around the world. He calls the Syrian refugee crisis the biggest since World War II. The book not only explains in detail the ardous journey undertaken by the Syrian refugees to countries in Europe, but also goes beyond that, to explain why this happens. There are smugglers who facilitate the movement of people from one country to another for huge amounts of money. There are also border security guards, police force, instructed by the State to be not so welcoming to refugees. Reece Jones, a Professor of Geography at the University of Hawaii, in Manoa has written the non-fiction: Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (2016) where he documents the millions of dollars countries have spent on border security projects. It is a reinforcing of national sovereignty in the age of capital and human mobility, which in itself is an anomaly. Conflict between States borders are nothing more than state tools for maintaining control of resources and population. In this book Jones depicts the militarization of the Mediterranean Sea and the so-called ‘migration crisis’ of 2015. The politics of framing the Syrian refugees as potential terrorists and the consequent regulations from the European Union restricts human movement across member-states. The militarization of borders prevents movement of people through violence. Regulations on movement “seeks to preserve privilege and opportunity by restricting access to resources and movements for others”(p.5). Jones names this system the global border regime. Samar Yazbek’s The Crossing: My journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria (2016) is a work of non-fiction that describes her own experiences as a refugee fleeing Syria and then returning to report the reality there. She is a writer-journalist who returned to her country Syria through a small hole in the fence situated at the Syrian-Turkish border. Her motive in returning was to report to the world the political situation, reasons of the civil war and the atrocities that were being done on innocents by the ISIS. The book begins with the regime, the start of democratic movements and the beginning of conflict in the country. Samar explains why Syrians have been forced to flee their land and seek asylum all over the world. The book gives images as well, of terrified children, and people sleeping in bunkers and in shattered buildings, fear of snipers, and the subhuman conditions of their existence without food, water or electricity. The period she covers is the period of the Syrian war: from 2012 to 2016. The refugee camp in Kenya, Dadaab shelters about 150,000 refugees from war-torn Somalia. Ben Rawlence in his book, The City of Thorns (2016) writes about this camp that was established in 1992. For more than twenty five years now, the refugees has been waiting to asylum in any country that will take them. Somalia was in the hands of militant groups which had links with Al-Shabaad and Al-Quaida. In 2008, when Al-Shabaad got control of a large part of Somalia, the country became another hub for terrorist activities. Dadaab camp was accused of training terrorists by the Kenyan Government. Ben Rawlence who spent three years inside the camp, to write about the conditions there , spoke to the refugees and heard their sad stories. The camp is funded by the U.S. According to this writer-journalist, the Kenyan security forces were harassing the refugees, through extortion, rape, and brutality. They wanted the refugees to return to war-racked Somalia. Dadaab refugees survive on the meagre rations sent to them by the UN. Despite their circumstances, they did not wish to return to their country and join the militant group Al-Shadaab. Although, the world outside believed that poverty, unemployment were natural factors for radicalization, the Somalians had disproved this. There were Imams, youth leaders in this camp, who still followed the path of tradition and goodness. Ben Rawlence who had seen the towering dignity and courage of these people, is frustrated to see the world seeing them as potential terrorists. This was the allegation of the Kenyan government after a mall in Nairobi was bombed. He saw the strange limbo of the camp life in Dadaab. Their temporary home had become a permanent one, though they did not want to admit it. They still hoped for resettlement in U.S or Europe on humanitarian grounds. “Caught between the ongoing war in Somalia and a world unwilling to welcome them, the refugees can only survive in the camp by imagining a life elsewhere” (Rawlence 2016,Prologue). To live in this ‘city of thorns’ (Dadaab camp) is to be “trapped mentally, as well as physically; your thoughts constantly flickering between impossible dreams and a nightmarish reality” (Prologue). It is the militarization of borders, strict immigration laws, and border control regime empowered by developed countries that is responsible for the illegal methods adopted by poor migrants. The educated and qualified have the means and the documents to migrate. They are largely welcomed in rich countries of the world. But the poor, unskilled, semi-skilled workers are denied a chance to improve their lives. These economic migrants as well as asylum seekers (refugees) are those that take illegal routes, paying traffickers to get a seat on a boat, or climb barbed fences, or go through holes in electric fences, to reach the other country. It is no wonder that many of them fail to make it. The politics around mass migrations and refugees must be addressed if lives have to be saved, especially in present times when there are more refugees than ever. Works Cited / References 1.Gratz, Alan. (2017), Refugees, Scholastic,Inc. New York. 2.Harding, Jeremy. (2012), Border Vigils:Keeping Migrants Out of the Rich World , Verso, London.New York. 3. Hynes, Patricia. (2021), Introducing Forced Migrations, Routledge, Abington. New York. 4. Jones, Reece.(2017), Violent Borders: Refugees And The Right To Move, Verso Books, London. New York. 5. Kingsley, Patrick. (2016), The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis, Faber, New York. 6. Passarlay, Gulwali.(2019), The Lightless Sky: A Twelve-Year Old Refugee’s Extraordinary Journey Across Half the World, Atlantic Books, London. 7. Schara, Zahara.(2014), The Syrian’s Story , CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 8. Seraillier, Ian. (1956), The Silver Sword, Jonathan Cape, London. 9.Yazdek, Samar. (2016), The Crossing: My Journey To the Shattered Heart of Syria, trans. Nashwa Gowanlock and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, Routledge, London. Sydney. Auckland. Johannesberg.