For refugees, From Postcolonialism: A very short introduction, Robert Young You find yourself a refugee You wake one morning from troubled dreams to discover that your world has been transformed. Under cover of night, you have been transported elsewhere. As you open your eyes, the first thing you notice is the sound of the wind blowing across flat empty land. You are walking with your family towards a living cemetery on the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Towards Peshawar, city of flowers, city of spies. A frontier town, the first stop for travellers from Kabul who have passed out through the carved city gate of Torkham, down the long narrow curves of grey rock of the Khyber Pass to the flat plain that lies beyond, to the Grand Trunk Road that runs, stretches, streams all the way to Kolkata. In the Old City, among the many shops and stalls in the Khyber Bazaar around the Darwash mosque, you will find a narrow street where the houses climb into the sky with their ornamented balconies exploding out towards each other. This street is known as the Qissa Khawani Bazaar, the street of storytellers. Over the centuries, fabulous intricate tales have been elaborated there between men relaxing over bubbling amber shishas, trying to outdo the professional story tellers, or amongst those more quickly sipping sweet syrupy tea in glasses at the chai stalls. The stories that are being traded there now are not for you. You are far to the west, beyond the colonial cantonment, beyond the huge suburbs of temporary housing of those who have arrived long since, out into the flats that lie before the mountains. The rest of your family, two of your children, are missing. You are carrying with you a bag of clothes, a mat, for prayer and sleep, a large plastic container for water and some aluminium pots. Some soldiers on the road stop you from walking further. The Jalozai refugee camp near Peshawar has been closed. Pashtuns who arrive now from Afghanistan are shepherded towards Chaman, not a refugee camp but a ‘waiting area’. Here once your eye moves above tent level the earth is flat and featureless until it hits the dusky distant shapes of the Himalayan foothills on the horizon. Since this is not an official refugee camp, there is no one here to register you or mark your arrival as you slowly make your way forwards. While your children sit exhausted and hungry on the bare sandy brown earth, the skin on their blown bellies marked with the crimson stars of infections, you go in search of water and food and the hope of being issued with materials for housing – three sticks of wood and a large plastic sheet. This will be your tent, where you and your family will live—those who manage to survive the lack of food, the dehydration, the dysentery, the cholera. You may leave within months. Or, if you are unlucky, like the Somali refugees in Kenya, the Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, the ‘internally displaced persons’ in Sri Lanka or the South Africa of the 1970s, you may find that you are to be there for a decade or for many more. This may be the only home you, your children and your grandchildren will ever have. Refugee: you are unsettled, uprooted. You have been translated. Who translated you? Who broke your links with the land? You have been forcibly moved off, or you have fled war or famine. You are mobile, mobilised, stumbling along your line of flight. But nothing flows. In moving, your life has come to a halt. Your life has been fractured, your family fragmented. The lovely dull familiar stabilities of ordinary everyday life and local social existence that you have known have passed. Compressed into a brief moment, you have experienced the violent disruptions of capitalism, the end of the comforts of the commonplace. You have become an emblem of everything that people are experiencing in cold modernity across different times. You encounter a new world, a new culture to which you have to adapt while trying to preserve your own recognisable forms of identity. Putting the two together is an experience of pain. Perhaps one day you, or your children will see it as a form of liberation, but not now. Life has become too fragile, too uncertain. You can count on nothing. You have become an object in the eyes of the world. Who is interested in your experiences now, in what you think or feel? Politicians of the world rush to legislate to prevent you from entry to their countries. Asylum seeker. Barred. You are the intruder. You are untimely, you are out of place. A refugee tearing yourself from your own land, carrying your body, beliefs, your language and your desires, your habits and your affections, across to the strange subliminal spaces of unrecognisable worlds. Everything that happens in this raw, painful experience of disruption, dislocation and disremembering paradoxically fuels the cruel but creative crucible of the postcolonial. Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC)
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 11:13:13 +0000
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