How Does It Feel to Be a Refugee? Five Books You Should Read to Understand Them More

Some of us know how words can create an invisible wound inside our chest, with pain that could linger for years. We also know how stories can give us the warmth that lasts longer than a sensation of cupping a glass of hot cocoa. Words are powerful. They inspire us, motivate us, change our perspective, and enrich our mind. So do good books – when we read them. As John Connolly stated, “reading encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways. It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another, which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.”

That’s why we asked our advisor, an avid reader and a refugee rights activist Shaffira Gayatri to suggest five books about refugees, written by refugees, that you can and should read to understand more about refugees and their life.

1. No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison

by Behrouz Boochani, (translated by) Omid Tofighian

“Horrified mothers ... mothers wrapped their children within the instincts of motherhood and escaped to the mountains. Young girls were searching for their dreams within the hearts of men rounded up into groups – so many groups – and being led down a road to the front lines of war. Groups – so many groups – returned as corpses ... We are a bunch of ordinary humans locked up simply for seeking refuge.”

Behrouz Boochani is an Iranian-Kurdish journalist who has been detained for 6 years on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, after he tried to seek asylum in Australia through a dangerous journey from Indonesia by boat. This book is an autobiography recounting his perilous journey and imprisonment, originally written in Farsi in a span of 5 years behind prison bars, through WhatsApp, that—ironically—won the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature awarded in Australia (and so of course he was unable to attend).

This book is awfully difficult to read, with extreme cruelty, violence, suicides, and lots of deaths. Boochani narrates the evils of the intersectional, systematic oppression (he calls it the “Kyriarchal System”) taking place on Australia’s offshore “processing centers” (basically a fancy word for prisons). It is outrageous that hundreds were imprisoned for years, afforded no basic human rights, without being put on trial for no other fault other than seeking asylum (which is also a human right)!!!! How could Australia get away with it for so long??! It crushed my soul and made me lose so much faith in humanity.

But don’t listen to me—listen to him. Boochani highlights Australia’s refugee policies in Manus Island as “a systematic attempt to strip refugees and asylum seekers of their identity, humanity and individuality".

"We are not angels and we are not evil," he said in an interview. "We are humans, simple humans, we are innocent people."

5/5.

2. The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State

by Nadia Murad

“I still think that being forced to leave your home out of fear is one of the worst injustices a human being can face. Everything you love is stolen, and you risk your life to live in a place that means nothing to you and where, because you come from a country now known for war and terrorism, you are not really wanted. So you spend the rest of your years longing for what you left behind while praying not to be deported.”

A really powerful and poignant book, this is a true story of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi-Iraqi Nobel Peace Prize winner and former captive of ISIS. Nadia comes from a poor but happy Yazidi family, and one day her small world shattered when ISIS came to her village, killed all the men and most of her family, and captured the women to be sold as sex slaves. She eventually escaped and went on to do advocacy work for her people, but of course, the trauma & pain never go away.

As you can probably guess, it’s an extremely difficult book to read, because of the vivid descriptions of the genocide, as well as the inhumane cruelty that ISIS perpetrated on the Yazidi community, a religious & ethnic minority in Iraq. Reading the book made me realise just how lucky I am to not be living in a war-torn country, to have “won the birth lottery” to be part of the majority in this country, and not to have to live in fear of being persecuted, killed, and trafficked as if I have no worth as a human being. 4.5/5.

3. City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

by Ben Rawlence

“At a time when there are more refugees than ever, the rich world has turned its back on them. Our myths and religions are steeped in the lore of exile and yet we fail to treat the living examples of that condition as fully human.”

Book 10 of 2018: City of Thorns — Ben Lawrence

This book tells the real-life stories of 9 Somalian refugees and asylum seekers in Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp in Kenya, and I would be lying if I said it was an easy book to read. Dadaab, which ironically means “a rocky hard place”, was home to over 300,000 at the time, and through these nine people, we are offered a glimpse into the life at the camp, many of whom have been born and raised there, and end up spending most (or all) of their lives in the camp.

While through experience at Calais’s “The Jungle” I was quite familiar with the problems at a refugee camp, the situation in Dadaab is so much more complex, deteriorated by the civil war going on in Somalia, the terrorist attacks by extremist group Al-Shabaab, the corrupt Kenyan government that benefits from the illegal sugar trade, the politics of international aid and the global anti-immigrant politics in general. It’s a story of hope and desperation, joy and sadness, and most of all, true resilience and grit; and it left me in all kinds of sadness and despair—maybe more sceptic of the world..

5/5.

4. Exit West

by Mohsin Hamid

“He prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world.”

Exit West is a story of refugees and migrants; but less of their journeys and more of the fragments of their lives in-between journeys and homes. It mostly centres on Saeed and Nadia, a young couple in love in an unnamed war-torn country, who were eventually forced to leave through metaphorical “doors” to Mykonos, London, San Francisco.

This is Hamid’s third book that I’ve read, and as I’ve often found with his books, it tends to fail to live up to the promise it holds, and I’m left feeling a tad dissatisfied, wishing he had ventured beyond the surface. “Exit West” deals with a topic that I’m deeply passionate about but with a touch of magic realism (I hate magic realism), and I find it frustrating how Hamid completely abandons the aspect of journeys, which is an integral part to the lives of refugees & migrants and shapes their experience, and instead replaces them with these Doraemon-like “magical doors”. Hamid’s narrative is quiet, almost to the point of lacklustre, and is much better in parts than it is as a whole.

3/5.

5. Sea Prayer

by Khaled Hosseini (Goodreads Author), Dan Williams (Illustrator)

A poignant poem,

of a man realising that he and his family,

despite having fled from the worst of horrors,

“are the uninvited. We are the unwelcome. We should take our misfortune elsewhere”—

of a wife whispering to her husband,

“Oh, but if they saw, my darling.

Even half of what you have.

If only they saw. They would say kinder things, surely.”—

of a father whispering to his son,

“Hold my hand.

Nothing bad will happen.”

while all he can think of is,

‘how deep the sea

and how vast, how indifferent.

How powerless I am to protect you from it.’

of trust in God and a prayer for protection,

“Because you,

you are precious cargo, Marwan,

the most precious there ever was.

I pray the sea knows this.

Inshallah.”

A deeply moving illustrated poem in memory of Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian refugee washed up at the shore in Turkey, whose death moved the world (and myself). But as Khaled Hosseini reminds us, a year since his death, there‘s been 4,176 deaths of those fleeing war and persecution. Hosseini’s words and Dan Williams’ illustration together is pure magic—just, the saddest kind.

5/5

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Do you have any books about refugees you think others should read? Mention it on your comment! :)

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