Between Horror and Hope

The refugee camp in the 21st century

Refugee camps have existed in various shapes all over the globe at various points in time and thus present far too broad as an object of study. The current situation however is unparalleled in history in terms of its extent.1 Moreover, what is singular is how long people remain in camps for. So-called ‘protracted refugee situations’, i.e. cases of forced migrants that remain in limbo for more than five years, are on the rise.2 In the majority of these cases, it means that people are stuck in a camp. The central role of the camp means that today forced migration, perhaps contrary to what one might believe, is to a large degree characterized by immobility and waiting.

These circumstances are reflected in the contemporary literary production dealing with forced migration. Since 2010, a small but conclusive corpus of works has emerged that situates camps in or near the SWANA region and along Europe’s borders. These include Atia Abawi’s A Land of Permanent Goodbyes (2018), Sulaiman Addonia’s Silence Is My Mother Tongue (2018), Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel’s The Gurugu Pledge (2017), Helon Habila’s Travelers (2019), Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), Mohammed Hanif’s Red Birds (2018) and Ben Rawlence’s City of Thorns (2016). The selection of novels in this study is guided by both thematic coherence and representational diversity. What connects these texts is, first and foremost, their setting in and around refugee camps. Some take place in camps entirely, others in large and decisive parts. Beyond this shared focus, their modes of representation, genre affiliations, and narrative voices diverge radically. The corpus was chosen to cover a broad spectrum of literary and formal approaches – from realist documentation to allegorical and speculative writing – so as to open up a wide range of perspectives that yield particularly rich insights for analysis. This allows for a multidimensional exploration of how the camp is imagined, narrated and politicized in anglophone literature.

Conceptualizing forced migration and the refugee camp

Throughout this study, camp inhabitants will be referred to as forced migrants instead of as refugees. That is because many people who would not be officially recognized as refugees still live in so-called ‘refugee camps’, which, for lack of a more suitable term, will still be referred to as that. Per its official UNHCR definition, the term ‘refugee’ is reserved for those fleeing from targeted personal persecution. This rules out a large percentage of those on the move today. The term ‘forced migrant’, on the other hand, is more inclusive, although – like any definitory category (s. Zetter, “More”; Crawley and Skleparis; Haddad) – it also has its pitfalls. In my usage of the term, however, I do not mean to establish a distinction between forced and voluntary migration as two different categories which qualify the legitimacy of a person’s flight. Empirical research has repeatedly shown that in practice there are no clear-cut distinctions between different groups of people on the move and that any existing attempts at categorization and definition merely follow policy-based objectives (s. Scalettaris 37; Crawley and Skleparis 50 f.). What is more, only those who have left their original countries count as ‘refugees’ according to the official definition. But refugee camps often also accommodate large groups of people displaced within their original countries. This is why, internally displaced people (IDPs) are also included in this study’s use of the term ‘forced migrancy’. Some of the material cited is referring to ‘refugees’, but, unless stated otherwise, those usages, as is often the case with everyday usages of the term, can also be seen as more inclusive that the official definition of the term (Zolberg et al. 4).

Like its residents, the refugee camp is also not easily defined. Any gathering of people who have fled or are fleeing could be called a camp. This could either be informal or, as it is mostly the case, initiated and run by the UNHCR. There are a few uniting characteristics, however, although self-organized camps might deviate from the following in interesting ways, more of which will be discussed in Chapters 6 and 7. Most importantly, refugee camps are always intended to provide only temporal accommodation, even if this can look very different in practice. Kirsten McConnachie conceptualizes the camp as a

site that is spatially bounded (i.e. it is an identifiable site); temporally limited (i.e., it exists pending an end to conflict or an alternative durable solution); is biopolitical (i.e. is designed and administered for a category of population rather than for individuals); and segregates residents from a surrounding population by formal or informal restrictions. (399)

As we will see, each of these characteristics is intrinsically disadvantageous to the camps’ inhabitants.

Officially, there are three solutions to issues regarding forced migration in the UNHCR’s repertoire: repatriation, integration in the land of asylum and resettlement in a third country. The camp is not one of them. It becomes the default response to forced migration, however, as, with conflicts stretching out over years, repatriation ceases to be an option and those fleeing are denied the option of integration or resettlement. However, unlike repatriation and resettlement, encampment, due to its temporal outset, is never a sustainable solution. While camp life may hold certain advantages, like the provision of shelter or the guaranteed fulfilment of basic needs, it is mainly marked by precarity. Another characteristic feature is the dependency on external aid, and thus, a significant degree of external control. Moreover, camps are mostly set in remote locations so that their inhabitants are isolated from surrounding populations and only have access to the poorest quality of land (R. Black 5). What this means is that there is no possibility for agriculture or any other economic activities that might enable one to build a life. The rationale behind this is clear: the settling down of forced migrants is not welcome, instead they are left to idle indefinitely. However, it is likely that both camp inhabitants and the surrounding populations could instead benefit from a closer integration. Their lack of integration into their surroundings and their contexts also becomes visible in the uniformity of many camps’ designs and layouts, as Elizabeth Cullen Dunn and Martin Demant Frederiksen report: