Literature with A White Helmet: The Textual-Corporeality of Being, Becoming, and Representing Refugees

161 Pages·2019·1.517 MB·English

by  Lava Asaad

Literature with A White Helmet
Literature with A White Helmet explores issues of refugee writers,
contemporary works of fiction and nonfiction on the refugee’s body and
experience, the biopolitics of refugees, and disputes over the ethicality
of representing refugees by writers and human rights activists. The
book relies on a broad selection of texts by authors who, in one way
or another, have experienced displacement, witnessed it, imagined it, or
co-written about it.
Lava Asaad received her PhD from Middle Tennessee State University
and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Auburn University.
Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
98 Still Here
Memoirs of Trauma, Illness and Loss
Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, Sue Joseph
99 Memory, Intermediality, and Literature
Something to Hold on to
Sara Tanderup Linkis
100 Make it Work
20th Century American Fiction and Fashion
Jan Ellyn Goggans
101 Haunted Europe
Continental Connections in English-Language Gothic Writing,
Film and New Media
Edited by Evert Jan Van Leeuwen and Michael Newton
102 Challenging Memories and Rebuilding Identities
Literary and Artistic Voices that undo the Lusophone Atlantic
Edited by Margarida Rendeiro and Federica Lupati
103 Literature with A White Helmet
The Textual-Corporeality of Being, Becoming, and Representing
Refugees
Lava Asaad
104 The Birth of Intertextuality
The Riddle of Creativity
Scarlett Baron
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com
Literature with A White
Helmet
The Textual-Corporeality of Being,
Becoming, and Representing Refugees
Lava Asaad
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Lava Asaad to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-27359-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-34808-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
To my Family,
To my Husband,
And to my Mentor

Contents
Introduction: Fragmentation and Existence 1
1 Does the Theory Hold? Reexamining Mobility
Studies and the Status of the Postmodern Refugee 11
2 Nomadic Writers: The Refugee as A Writer, Texts as
Refugees (Samar Yazbek, Sa’dallah Wannous, Nihad
Sirees, Khalid Khalifa, Mustafa Khalifa) 38
3 Clandestine Bodies in Transit: Refugees’ Pipe
Dreams (Laila Lalami, Mohsin Hamid,
Viet Thanh Nguyen) 66
4 Obstructed Routes, Muted Bodies (Ghassan
Kanafani, Hassan Blasim, Pietro Bartolo) 91
5 Can the Refugee Speak? Voices by Proxy,
Storytelling, and Surrogate Agencies 115
Conclusion: Everywhere and Nowhere 134
Works Cited 139
Index 151

Introduction
Fragmentation and Existence
Identities as fragments, strewn across borders, within and outside na-
tional narratives, belonging to the future with complicated ties to the
past, were and continue to be part of narratives I grew up with. As part
of the Kurdish diaspora (I was born in 1989), whose ethnic validity has
been questioned within multiple rigid national- states, such as Syria, Iraq,
Turkey, and Iran, mobility was and is ever present in stories woven about
the past and the present. My identity is part of an imagined community
that has no tangible geographical borders which romanticized both the
literal and the metaphorical notions of being a nomad, of constant flight
away from identity erasures in the name of the homogenized nation-
state, be it Arabs, Turks, or Iranians. A Syrian Kurd: the two halves of
my identity—where the latter was forever displaced and imagined, the
former was rooted, fixed, and had a place on the map. With the recent
shaking- up of the mighty nation- state, Syrian bodies, alive or dead or
missing, are also scattered across the globe, marking a new layer of dis-
placement about me, of me, and perhaps in me.
To understand and to come to terms with the becoming of my identity,
I slightly eschewed geopolitical rhetorics to focus on the ways in which
my identity has been formed, perceived, and fossilized. In the same spirit
of Liisa H. Malkki’s exploration of Hutu refugees in Tanzanian camps
where she observed a sense of becoming a refugee as a social and a po-
litical construct, I explore literary works seeking signs and clues to com-
prehend the global crisis. Malkki learns from the camp the difference
between “novice” and “true or mature” refugees in camps where they
were inducted on how to develop a new form of “Self- knowledge”.1 This
book takes Malkki’s primary steps and continues to explore other la-
bels and self- knowledge(s) formulated inside and outside camps, real or
imaginative. Thus, I explore fictional and nonfictional expressions ( often
autobiographically informed) of the refugee experiences, which have re-
course to my personal experience, including lived experiences both of
those who are legally defined as refugees and those who continue to
roam, as immigrants. With this in mind, the vast text selection is pur-
poseful to show the vastness of human displacement.