Through the heavy logistics of establishing a new research project, anecdotal information is everywhere. These are hints—the first clues for an outsider (not necessarily, though certainly in this case, a “foreigner”). At some point in the future some strands will make up the first scraps of “data”, but today, they are still peoples' stories.
There is a double bind in attempting to tell these stories. They are ripe with personality, humanity, emotion—stories that one is tempted to say “must be told”. Family members here, there, and gone away, dreams for the future interrupted, dismantled, newly imagined. All of those rich details which give humanity to the people I speak to on the street, in corner-stores and stripped-down restaurants are also details which could single out, identify, and place at risk.
But to boil down the stories to the unidentifiable is to strip the human from the story. The Syrians I speak to (and Jordanians, Palestinians, Iraqis, Egyptians—just people, really, coming from starting-points, here now, and heading outward on their various trajectories) are not raw blocks of impersonal tragedy. Uniformly, the lives they left behind were rich in something. How does a person simultaneously respect the desperate trust of strangers and still communicate in concrete terms the wealth of life that, once held in thousands on thousands of individual homes, is so hard to find in exile?
It is possible it that simply cannot be done.
There are some common threads which pulse with feeling. People here—Syrians, Iraqis—understand very well how the label of “refugee” works to erase their histories. As one young man told me, “when they use the word 'refugee' they think you are a beggar, have always been a beggar, and always will be a beggar. No. I had a life.” People had jobs which they loved or hated, lived in homes all different and kept beautiful, drove cars, took children to school, bought gifts, reveled in and resisted communities as anyone else on this earth. “Refugee” replaces those markers of life with the image of the camp, the usurper, the illegal, dust, exhaustion, demand, desperation, the outstretched hand.
The Arabic term for refugee is avoided at all costs by those who bear it; used only by foundation staff and Jordanians who (at that moment) are highlighting the stresses newcomers place on the community. It is almost never used to refer to anyone in particular. We all have Syrian friends, Iraqi friends, the “good guys” who stand out from the crowd of nameless “refugees” who raise rents and lower salaries.
These same people, who for political reasons lack the right to self-sufficiency, often identify utility with dignity. “I need money from somewhere,” says one, “but more than that, I need to fill my day.” The emotional impact of an endless stretch of empty days, trapped in the home for lack of funds, even the social price of a cup of tea in a cafe, is a kind of exile-within-exile. When I talk to Syrian “incentive-based” volunteers, all on three month rotations, the end of their term looms endlessly. Loss of income is frightening—theoretically, the most important consequence—but the loss of purpose seems much more swollen in the mind.
Daily purpose recaptures the threads of life-narrative. People living here—from whatever origin—do not need to put lives on hold. Circumstances produce idleness as an unintended byproduct of economics and politics. But “purpose” does not have to mean political integration or gainful employment—though perhaps logically it should, as Alexander Betts has recently and eloquently argued. It can simply be custodianship of something important to oneself.
There are opportunities here to build further on the lessons we, as scholars and practitioners in the field of forced migration, have only begun to learn.
There is a double bind in attempting to tell these stories. They are ripe with personality, humanity, emotion—stories that one is tempted to say “must be told”. Family members here, there, and gone away, dreams for the future interrupted, dismantled, newly imagined. All of those rich details which give humanity to the people I speak to on the street, in corner-stores and stripped-down restaurants are also details which could single out, identify, and place at risk.
But to boil down the stories to the unidentifiable is to strip the human from the story. The Syrians I speak to (and Jordanians, Palestinians, Iraqis, Egyptians—just people, really, coming from starting-points, here now, and heading outward on their various trajectories) are not raw blocks of impersonal tragedy. Uniformly, the lives they left behind were rich in something. How does a person simultaneously respect the desperate trust of strangers and still communicate in concrete terms the wealth of life that, once held in thousands on thousands of individual homes, is so hard to find in exile?
It is possible it that simply cannot be done.
There are some common threads which pulse with feeling. People here—Syrians, Iraqis—understand very well how the label of “refugee” works to erase their histories. As one young man told me, “when they use the word 'refugee' they think you are a beggar, have always been a beggar, and always will be a beggar. No. I had a life.” People had jobs which they loved or hated, lived in homes all different and kept beautiful, drove cars, took children to school, bought gifts, reveled in and resisted communities as anyone else on this earth. “Refugee” replaces those markers of life with the image of the camp, the usurper, the illegal, dust, exhaustion, demand, desperation, the outstretched hand.
The Arabic term for refugee is avoided at all costs by those who bear it; used only by foundation staff and Jordanians who (at that moment) are highlighting the stresses newcomers place on the community. It is almost never used to refer to anyone in particular. We all have Syrian friends, Iraqi friends, the “good guys” who stand out from the crowd of nameless “refugees” who raise rents and lower salaries.
These same people, who for political reasons lack the right to self-sufficiency, often identify utility with dignity. “I need money from somewhere,” says one, “but more than that, I need to fill my day.” The emotional impact of an endless stretch of empty days, trapped in the home for lack of funds, even the social price of a cup of tea in a cafe, is a kind of exile-within-exile. When I talk to Syrian “incentive-based” volunteers, all on three month rotations, the end of their term looms endlessly. Loss of income is frightening—theoretically, the most important consequence—but the loss of purpose seems much more swollen in the mind.
Daily purpose recaptures the threads of life-narrative. People living here—from whatever origin—do not need to put lives on hold. Circumstances produce idleness as an unintended byproduct of economics and politics. But “purpose” does not have to mean political integration or gainful employment—though perhaps logically it should, as Alexander Betts has recently and eloquently argued. It can simply be custodianship of something important to oneself.
There are opportunities here to build further on the lessons we, as scholars and practitioners in the field of forced migration, have only begun to learn.