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lucysod's review against another edition
5.0
about to put in a lot of want-to-reads of books from the authors in this collection
tzurky's review against another edition
3.0
Even though this has the same topic as Nguyen’s other collection, the approach and the type of stories told is very different. Most authors recount their own experience as refugees or with refugees. The tone of the stories is much drier, more pragmatic and is quite similar across stories which makes the reading experience less diverse than the collection written by Nguyen himself. The impression of sameness is also underscored by the fact that the stories don’t have that much depth, unfortunately. Overall I liked this collection much less, even though I preferred the tone and the stories didn’t feel claustrophobic.
The most disappointing story by far is the one recounting the experiences of a Bosnian refugee which is told so dryly and quickly that it becomes completely uninteresting despite the unbelievably interesting content. Perhaps that was the point - to chastise the reader for their voyeurism? Nevertheless, I think the story and the refugee it belongs to deserved a more thorough and compassionate and better worded recounting.
I also didn’t care much for the images. They were very basic and lacked any emotional punch.
The most disappointing story by far is the one recounting the experiences of a Bosnian refugee which is told so dryly and quickly that it becomes completely uninteresting despite the unbelievably interesting content. Perhaps that was the point - to chastise the reader for their voyeurism? Nevertheless, I think the story and the refugee it belongs to deserved a more thorough and compassionate and better worded recounting.
I also didn’t care much for the images. They were very basic and lacked any emotional punch.
alexisgarcia's review against another edition
dark
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
fast-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Classism, Colonisation, Genocide, Grief, and Racism
archytas's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.75
"Becoming a refugee is a gradual process, a bleaching out, a transition into a ghostly existence. With the exception of those born in refugee camps, every refugee used to have a life. It doesn’t matter whether you were a physician in Bosnia or a goat herder in the Congo: what matters is that a thousand little anchors once moored you to the world. Becoming a refugee means watching as those anchors are severed, one by one, until at last you’re floating outside of society, an untethered phantom in need of a new life."
This is a transcendent collection of writing. Nguyen has collected an impressively talented group of writers to contribute, including Lev Golinkin, who wrote the above. All have lived experience of fleeing for refuge, but of course, each writer comes at the brief from various directions.
Other absolute standouts for me included Fatima Bhutto's Flesh and Sand, which plunges the reader straight into her trepidation in an exhibition, and explores the multitude of selves while staying anchored in the realities of American desert migration. Aleksander Hemon's God's Fate which tells the extraordinary story of one man, who having survived torture (and genocide) in Bosnia, displacement when his village was given to the other side in the settlement, the murder of his closest companion, chronic unemployment and gruelling physical labour, only to wind up gay, poor and Muslim in Trump's America, When he and his husband join the local mosque despite opposition, you can see that at this point, he is pretty confident of surviving anything. Kao Kalia Yang's The Yao Warriors pays tribute to the tweens in her refugee camp in an unforgettable essay. Rayna Grande, on the other hand, rips out all our hearts with a single line: "It is the central irony of my life that my parents emigrated to try to save our family, but by doing so, they destroyed it."
Many of these stories raise questions - about the scapegoating of vulnerable people, the policies that create displacement, the othering of an experience which is becoming distressingly common. But the real power is in the smaller stories, the pieces that give a momentary sense of what it might be like to take a short trip abroad and never be able to return home, to pack and run overnight, to be raised in a kind of exile never knowing quite what is meant by home. These are stories of everyday bravery as well as persecution, failures as well as successes, and common, stinging indignities as well as welcome and solidarity. And they all have the heck written out of them, so the quotables come thick and fast (Nguyen's own introduction is also a standout here).
This is a transcendent collection of writing. Nguyen has collected an impressively talented group of writers to contribute, including Lev Golinkin, who wrote the above. All have lived experience of fleeing for refuge, but of course, each writer comes at the brief from various directions.
Other absolute standouts for me included Fatima Bhutto's Flesh and Sand, which plunges the reader straight into her trepidation in an exhibition, and explores the multitude of selves while staying anchored in the realities of American desert migration. Aleksander Hemon's God's Fate which tells the extraordinary story of one man, who having survived torture (and genocide) in Bosnia, displacement when his village was given to the other side in the settlement, the murder of his closest companion, chronic unemployment and gruelling physical labour, only to wind up gay, poor and Muslim in Trump's America, When he and his husband join the local mosque despite opposition, you can see that at this point, he is pretty confident of surviving anything. Kao Kalia Yang's The Yao Warriors pays tribute to the tweens in her refugee camp in an unforgettable essay. Rayna Grande, on the other hand, rips out all our hearts with a single line: "It is the central irony of my life that my parents emigrated to try to save our family, but by doing so, they destroyed it."
Many of these stories raise questions - about the scapegoating of vulnerable people, the policies that create displacement, the othering of an experience which is becoming distressingly common. But the real power is in the smaller stories, the pieces that give a momentary sense of what it might be like to take a short trip abroad and never be able to return home, to pack and run overnight, to be raised in a kind of exile never knowing quite what is meant by home. These are stories of everyday bravery as well as persecution, failures as well as successes, and common, stinging indignities as well as welcome and solidarity. And they all have the heck written out of them, so the quotables come thick and fast (Nguyen's own introduction is also a standout here).
amymo73's review against another edition
4.0
I picked up this book a bit ago as it's on the historic Chautauqua Scientific and Literary Circle. Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the mass refugee exodus. On top of crisis around the world that continue to displace people. And it's Lent. I was gearing up to say there was no better time to pick up a collection of stories by refugee writers on refugee lives. But it is ALWAYS a good time to read the stories of people with different life experiences than you.
All the stories were real and made me feel. And also made me feel connected. I have not left my homeland, but I have grown and the sense of lose of childhood, loss of family and friends, and a history deep in my DNA from people who DID leave for America -- those sentiments resonated with me and made me think.
From the introduction by Viet Thahn Nguyen:
"We need stories to give voice to a writer's vision, but also, possibility, to speak for the voiceless. This yearning to hear the voiceless is a powerful rhetoric but also potentially a dangerous one if it prevents us from doing more than listening to a story or reading a book. Just because we have listened to that story or read that book does not mean that anything has changed for the voiceless. Readers and writers should not deceive themselves that literature changes the world. Literature chances the world of readers and writers, but literature does not change the world until people get out of their chairs, go out in the world, and do something to transform the conditions of which the literature speaks. Otherwise literature will just be a fetish for readers and writers, allowing them to think that they are hearing the voiceless when they are really only hearing the writer's individual voice."
From "The Road" by Chris Abani:
"Some of the hardest things about the refugee experience -- that being a refugee is neither a noun nor a verb, but a stutter in time-space, always repeating. You are simultaneously always a refugee even when you are no longer a refugee."
"The body of the refugee will come to terms with the fragility of nationhood and stability. With the realization that when we are looking into the face of refugees, we are looking directly into our own possibility. ... This realization, that identity is fluid and never actualized or ever stable, and our own denial of this, is at the heart of the human condition. We fear, and sometimes hate, refugees, because their existence is our deepest fear: that we don't and never will belong anywhere."
"America is not really a nation of immigrants but rather of refugees. Trauma, displacement and a fanatical hope have marked all Americans from the occupants of the Mayflower through every subsequent group who arrived, or were forcibly brought here."
"We confront the refugee that we are starting into the mirror of our own memories of displacement."
"Humans have a near infinite capacity to normalize the world in order to survive and thrive."
From "Common Story" by David Bezmozgis:
"They hadn't necessarily needed to go. They weren't fleeing war or genocide, but only the economic shambles of the Soviet Union and its habitual, endemic anti-Semitism. But this wasn't new. They'd lived with it all their lives. Neither idealists nor iconoclasts, they were taking a gamble simply because an opportunity had presented itself and others had seized it."
"In the only way that matters, those other refugees are like them. They are not paragons of virtue, but flawed and unexceptional people who adhere to the basic tenets of the social contract. Because, fundamentally, what do modern democracies ask of their citizens? To obey the laws and pay their taxes. If they have done nothing else, my family has done that."
From "Guests of the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa" by Lev Golinkin:
"... the impression that people turn into refugees overnight. In my family's experience, that istn't rue. Become a refugee is a gradula process, a bleaching out, a transition into a ghostly existence. With the exception of those born in refugee camps, every refugee used to have a life. It doesn't matter whether you were a physician in Bosnia or a goat herder in the Congo."
"Once you've made the transition from When are we eating to When are they feeding us? you know you're a refugee."
"Dad paid for the postcards, then carefully stormed them, along with the receipt, inside his large overcoat. 'You have to act like a human being' he told me. ... After months of only necessities, it felt wonderful to buy something, just because."
From "God's Fate" by Aleksandar Hemon:
"Each getting here is a narrative entanglement of memory and history and emotions and pain and joy and guilt and ideas undone and reborn."
From "Refugees and Exiles" by Marina Lewyka:
"Maybe as with all of us the country which is our true home is the idyllic rose-tinted land of our own childhood, from which are always exiles."
From "This is What the Journey Does" by Maaza Mengiste:
"Lazarus' complete silence in John 11 and 12 ... Though the Sanhedrin wanted to kill him all along with Jesus Christ, through his resurrected life and all that it represented was as much a threat to them as the claims of Jesus, he is not allowed to speak. Lazarus is muted miracle, still alive today as a metaphor for uncanny second chances."
"You do not arrive the same as when you left."
From "The Ungrateful Refugee" by Dina Nayeri:
"Even those on the left talk about how immigrants make America great. They point to photographs of happy refugees turned good citizens, listing their contributions, as if that is the price of existing in the same country, on the same earth.
"But isn't glorifying the refugees who thrive according to Western standards just another way to endorse this same gratitude politics? ... Is the life of happy mediocrity a privilege reserved for those who never stray from home?"
"What America did was a basic human obligation. It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks. It is your duty to answer us, even if we don't give you sugary success stories."
From "A Refugee Again" by Vu Tran:
"You can't write meaningfully or honestly about anything, even things that have nothing to do with your life, if you haven't yet confronted who you are."
From "New Lands, New Selves," by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
"The metropolitan landscape of this city of my childhood is what I cling to the most, because it remains static and unchanging, filling me with nostalgia when I visit home, unlike the family and friends I have left there, who have grown and changed in ways that surprise and sadden me."
All the stories were real and made me feel. And also made me feel connected. I have not left my homeland, but I have grown and the sense of lose of childhood, loss of family and friends, and a history deep in my DNA from people who DID leave for America -- those sentiments resonated with me and made me think.
From the introduction by Viet Thahn Nguyen:
"We need stories to give voice to a writer's vision, but also, possibility, to speak for the voiceless. This yearning to hear the voiceless is a powerful rhetoric but also potentially a dangerous one if it prevents us from doing more than listening to a story or reading a book. Just because we have listened to that story or read that book does not mean that anything has changed for the voiceless. Readers and writers should not deceive themselves that literature changes the world. Literature chances the world of readers and writers, but literature does not change the world until people get out of their chairs, go out in the world, and do something to transform the conditions of which the literature speaks. Otherwise literature will just be a fetish for readers and writers, allowing them to think that they are hearing the voiceless when they are really only hearing the writer's individual voice."
From "The Road" by Chris Abani:
"Some of the hardest things about the refugee experience -- that being a refugee is neither a noun nor a verb, but a stutter in time-space, always repeating. You are simultaneously always a refugee even when you are no longer a refugee."
"The body of the refugee will come to terms with the fragility of nationhood and stability. With the realization that when we are looking into the face of refugees, we are looking directly into our own possibility. ... This realization, that identity is fluid and never actualized or ever stable, and our own denial of this, is at the heart of the human condition. We fear, and sometimes hate, refugees, because their existence is our deepest fear: that we don't and never will belong anywhere."
"America is not really a nation of immigrants but rather of refugees. Trauma, displacement and a fanatical hope have marked all Americans from the occupants of the Mayflower through every subsequent group who arrived, or were forcibly brought here."
"We confront the refugee that we are starting into the mirror of our own memories of displacement."
"Humans have a near infinite capacity to normalize the world in order to survive and thrive."
From "Common Story" by David Bezmozgis:
"They hadn't necessarily needed to go. They weren't fleeing war or genocide, but only the economic shambles of the Soviet Union and its habitual, endemic anti-Semitism. But this wasn't new. They'd lived with it all their lives. Neither idealists nor iconoclasts, they were taking a gamble simply because an opportunity had presented itself and others had seized it."
"In the only way that matters, those other refugees are like them. They are not paragons of virtue, but flawed and unexceptional people who adhere to the basic tenets of the social contract. Because, fundamentally, what do modern democracies ask of their citizens? To obey the laws and pay their taxes. If they have done nothing else, my family has done that."
From "Guests of the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa" by Lev Golinkin:
"... the impression that people turn into refugees overnight. In my family's experience, that istn't rue. Become a refugee is a gradula process, a bleaching out, a transition into a ghostly existence. With the exception of those born in refugee camps, every refugee used to have a life. It doesn't matter whether you were a physician in Bosnia or a goat herder in the Congo."
"Once you've made the transition from When are we eating to When are they feeding us? you know you're a refugee."
"Dad paid for the postcards, then carefully stormed them, along with the receipt, inside his large overcoat. 'You have to act like a human being' he told me. ... After months of only necessities, it felt wonderful to buy something, just because."
From "God's Fate" by Aleksandar Hemon:
"Each getting here is a narrative entanglement of memory and history and emotions and pain and joy and guilt and ideas undone and reborn."
From "Refugees and Exiles" by Marina Lewyka:
"Maybe as with all of us the country which is our true home is the idyllic rose-tinted land of our own childhood, from which are always exiles."
From "This is What the Journey Does" by Maaza Mengiste:
"Lazarus' complete silence in John 11 and 12 ... Though the Sanhedrin wanted to kill him all along with Jesus Christ, through his resurrected life and all that it represented was as much a threat to them as the claims of Jesus, he is not allowed to speak. Lazarus is muted miracle, still alive today as a metaphor for uncanny second chances."
"You do not arrive the same as when you left."
From "The Ungrateful Refugee" by Dina Nayeri:
"Even those on the left talk about how immigrants make America great. They point to photographs of happy refugees turned good citizens, listing their contributions, as if that is the price of existing in the same country, on the same earth.
"But isn't glorifying the refugees who thrive according to Western standards just another way to endorse this same gratitude politics? ... Is the life of happy mediocrity a privilege reserved for those who never stray from home?"
"What America did was a basic human obligation. It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks. It is your duty to answer us, even if we don't give you sugary success stories."
From "A Refugee Again" by Vu Tran:
"You can't write meaningfully or honestly about anything, even things that have nothing to do with your life, if you haven't yet confronted who you are."
From "New Lands, New Selves," by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
"The metropolitan landscape of this city of my childhood is what I cling to the most, because it remains static and unchanging, filling me with nostalgia when I visit home, unlike the family and friends I have left there, who have grown and changed in ways that surprise and sadden me."
bysoleilceline's review against another edition
5.0
Phenomenal collection, a must read for anyone. If you’re unfamiliar with the many refugee crises going on in the world and don’t know what it’s like being a migrant, refugee, or asylum seeker, uprooted and forging on for survivable in an unknown land, read this collection.
hilaryrowell's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
rjproffer's review against another edition
5.0
A collection of messages of pain and intolerance in connection to their country of origin stands in my mind against the hatred that has simmered and erupted in these days of Brexit and Trump.