This week’s readings highlight the layered challenges of migration, beginning with the decision to leave, the uncertainty of the journey, questions of what life will look like if resettlement is possible, the fear of permanent separation from loved ones, and the struggle to remain connected to one’s homeland. They also continue what was featured in past weeks’ readings, as they demonstrate the weakening in cooperation among countries part of the European Union, a severing that ultimately shaped and worsened the migrant itself as Kingsley claims in The New Odyssey.
The readings emphasize that escaping danger does not mean the worries of migration ever truly end, the immigrant experience is an ever-evolving journey. This is reflected in the stories of Syrian doctors weighing whether to return after Assad’s fall in the Washington Post, and in Hakeema Taha’s visit back to her Iraqi village, where she honored family members killed by IS fighters while she herself had found refuge in Germany, as portrayed in the ARTE documentary.
If I could title this blog, I would title it “Vomiting Party” as I believe it metaphorically represents the experiences of many of the refugees we are reading about. The journey can be exhausting, sometimes even nauseating, as was the case for Hashem al-Souki in the Kingsley reading, who was so crammed in a wooden dinghy heading to Northern Europe with other migrants that in route ‘everyone’s clothes [were] caked in other people’s vomit, each [had] paid more than $2,000 to spew over fellow refugees.”
However, even after you have concluded this journey to Northern Europe and possibly resettled and feel some sense of peace, the vomiting continues. Not from fellow refugees, but from politicians like those in the AfD in Germany for example or civilians telling you to go back home, and that your presence is hurting the country. What they don’t recognize is that many of these migrants don’t have anything to return to. Many migrants have had to pay the price in metaphorically vomit and money, but the stories of Hashem, Hakeema, and more show us that people can rise above all the hatred.
While the Odyssey metaphor is clear, I thought of The Handmaid’s Tale and the parallels between Hashem’s story and June’s more often. June may be a fictional character but Margaret Atwood, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, has claimed that everything that occurred in the book has happened at some point in history or real life. Both lose autonomy to political systems beyond their control, Hashem dragged away from his children by armed men, June torn from her family by Gilead. Both were able to escape but contemplated doing so, the guilt of leaving loved ones, and the grief of watching their homelands collapse.
Both of their stories resist ostracization, humanizing migrants in The New Odyssey and survivors in The Handmaid’s Tale. As Kingsley writes, “in some ways they are the lucky ones, since they have been allowed to live.”
